This may go some way towards answering Neptunus Rex's original enquiry. The article refers to the A320 pre production. The reference to flying manually in turbulence, or when other things have gone wrong, is interesting.
http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchi...81 - 1770.html
Traditionally, fail-safe pitch stability has been assured by keeping the aircraft's e.g. forward of the centre of lift, the required nose-up moment provided by negative lift at the tailplane. Canard stabilisers are the traditional answer to the illogical idea of intentionally producing negative lift anywhere on the aircraft. The idea now is to position the resolved lift and weigh centres at the same point; but this makes the aircraft harder to fly manually—it becomes "twitchy"—and it would no longer have a natural tendency to pitch nose down at the stall, thus recovering.
But who will fly these new-generation aeroplanes manually, an overconfident electronics engineer may ask? The pilots will say that they want to be able to, and if the potential passenger were to hear that only a machine stood between his arrival or non-arrival at his destination, Airbus would have a job marketing its product.
But the relaxed stability aeroplane will come, and the A320 will be as close to relaxed stability as technology and safety allow. Britain's Boyal Aircraft Establishment has done quite a lot of work on the idea by moving sandbags about in the cabin of a BAe One-Eleven, and it says that flying the machine manually is not the problem it is made out to be. There remains, however, the problem of what it is like to fly manually in turbulence, or when other things have gone wrong and crew stress is high. What Airbus will probably do is leave the e.g. slightly ahead of the centre of lift and use a smaller, lighter composite tailplane. In fact the final tailplane, unlike the one shown in this feature, may look slightly odd to traditional aviators' eyes, because it will be "out of scale" from the rest of the machine.
There is an alternative to sandbags for moving the e.g. to the required position—fuel. But Airbus will not move fuel about in the A320. It costs too much to fit the systems. Though the engineers are there with the ideas, the accountants still hold sway, and Airbus is proving very astute at getting the cost/design compromise right for the market.