I cannot find the post of PJ2 from above in which he mentions a schematic and neither can the search facility.
I believe that with fbw we have created two classes of pilots.We have the old school who are probably better polers and have been brought up on tactile feedback through feel,and sound of their aircraft and those who have only flown an electric jet where the aircraft has never let them down.The latter have flown in alternate and direct laws only in the simulator and trust the automation implicitly because normally it always works.They are used to a low workload and probably the odd single failure not the multiple that would have been introduced by unreliable airspeed..
The former do not like the fbw as it does not fly like a proper aircraft,the tactile clues such as engine noise,pitch changes with large power changes ,the nose dropping in turns unless you put in a little nose up pitch are all missing.The thing they hate most is that you do not have a direct stick to control surface relationship and you cannot feel your colleagues inputs through the sidestick..who is the better pilot and who is better at dealing with unusual situations?
I believe that Airbus decided that the weak link is the pilot and they do not want you flying the aircraft.They also want to make it easy to use low experience pilots in their aircraft but this is fine until some real stick and rudder skills are required.What happens then if you never learned these skills?Perhaps the lessons of AF 447 will show us.
Last edited by tubby linton; 6th June 2011 at 18:58.