Well, I've been reading this for a while. It's been quite interesting, including the C vs. Ada fights and the veiled reference to flying the Skyraider.
That expert report table with the 36/43 incidents is pretty impressive, as is the note that nearly two-thirds of the events were reported after AF447 (although most of them occurred beforehand).
Isn't the industry standard one catastrophic failure ever 30 or so incidents?
One of the "take-aways" from this discussion could be that, regardless of whether FBW plays a role in this accident, what it does do is increase the criticality of a certain piece of equipment, and it did so based on underreported reliability data (even if the Thales AA was a particularly bad design, from this data every pitot tube should suffer from underreported failures).
Or, in other terms: in-service reliability figures are scientifically worthless.
The "responsibility/authority" distinction is at least superficially appealing. Another way to put it is that if a system design routinely drops a load in the operator's lap, the designers cannot expect more than 29 out of 30 operators to make the right decision. On the other side, at least 20 out of 30 operators are going to do everything they can not to be #30.
And the Swiss cheese analogy has its charms too, if only because the next slice is more likely to have the same holes as the previous one than not.
please carry on.