1491-Excellent analysis regardless of accident findings
As much as the author of 1491 has spent in the Airbus , I have spent in Boeing and Douglas aircraft and although I finished my career( 26,000 hrs) in glass cockpits I consider myself a "steam gauge" pilot. In the days when we have the glass all over the place the problem in recreating this scenario will be determining "what the pilots saw"....what information was given to them and what screens were just blank?
Not too long after the Delta L-1011 crashed at DFW the airlines came up with an AAMP (Advanced Aircraft Maneuvering Program) that was meant to show the pilots of transports how to get max performance out of their aircraft...one thing we at our airline found out that when the sim was put out of the normal flight envelope and then handed over to blindfolded flight crew they were able to recover the aircraft by reference to the attitude indicators and airspeed alone....EXCEPT for our Airbus sims...all the screens went black with a big RED X across them...apparently since they were outside their flight envelope ...I say apparently because we could never get a response from Airbus on why this occurred except the same caveat I read in response to the professor from University of Berlin ...face it , if any fault is laid at the Airbus door for bad design/ cause of accident, that will be the end of Airbus....and the EU will not stand by for that....blame the pilots , they can't talk back.
There's been enough doubt cast over the whole Airbus laws of control to warrant a serious review....One thing I do know....if I wanted to split -s a 747 from FL 410 , it would roll over and do what I asked it to . Nobody here has shown that the Airbus would or could. I am not trying to say that they don't have some great features but for 3 and one half minutes three very qualified pilots tried to avoid dying and were unable to do so because either they didn't know what was REALLY happening or because they couldn't do anything about it. Either way AIRBUS owes them and us a better answer than WE need more training...maybe they do in how to design Pilot's airplanes...