This Langewiesche is very enthusiastic about the FBW.
He sounds like the young guys doing the 320 type rating course.
And many of the wonders he describes are avionics related, common to many types, such as the speed trend vector.
Everytime I read that the airplane will hold wings level even if I don't touch the sidestick I get angry. It is not true! It rolls if you let it, even without significan gusts.
I also hate that many people believe the FBW is like the CWS of a Boeing. It is not! 320's FBW keeps 1g flight path. It is not an attitude hold mode.
A conventional pitch trim will make an airplane to maintain airspeed, which is as good as maintaining flight path, if not better.
If Sully had not flown the airplane it would have crashed, of course. Maybe at alfa max, but crashing is crashing. And certainly not wings level.
A well trimmed 737 would fly at the required speed very well. No 737 pilot would have needed extraodinary ability and muscle to glide and ditch. Having hidraulics, of course.
By the way. It is possible to stall a 320 in normal law. Airbus says.
Rmac
You've got it: The human being is both the weakest and strongest link in an airplane's safety.
Trying to build "pilot proof" airplanes, or UAVs or whatever is going in the wrong way. Same as trying to train error proof pilots.
What they have to build are airplanes that
enhance human beings. Then they will really increase safety. The technology required for that is in the field of avionics, rather than in the field of flight controls.
The GPWS is a human enhancing device, for instance. Gives us the "aracnid sense" that only spiderman has. It warns us and we pull up. Then, the airbus FBW gives us 2,5g without exceeding limits. Great!
I want more of this. I don't want stuff that will try to substitute me, but stuff that will enhance me, that will give me "superpowers", and, very important, stuff that I will not have to struggle with for the control of the airplane.
In airbus they have had to rewrite some code and algorithms in the flight control FBW after the crash landing of a 320, about 8 years ago.
Because...
Human error also affects engineers! (remember the extremely expensive space probe crashing in Mars because of a Kg-Lbs mistake?). Dissimilar redundancy will not always prevent gross errors that can render a crew unable to prevent a disaster having perfecly operational flight surfaces and hydraulic power in a given circunstances.
Sully has "the Right Stuff" as Tom Wolfe put it. Most of us like to think that we have it, but few
know it, as we haven't been tested. If you re-read Wolfe's book you will see that many well high in the ranking fell out of the group of those with "the Right Stuff" when they had their test.