Originally Posted by
galaxy flyer
Now, I am all in favor of FBW; it simplifies systems; saves weight, and increases efficiency. But, why did the engineers not just make it fly last the last 100 years of aviation.
Because at some point the training wheels have to come off. If everything was made to work "just like the old days" this board would be a complete pig to use!
Put another way, Boeing made the 777 to simulate a feel similar to that which Tex Johnson had in the Dash-38. Airbus made the A320 FBW series to feel similar to the equipment the Apollo astronauts used to land on the moon. The methods are *different*. Not better, not worse, but *different*.
I don't understand what's so confusing about "if in Normal Law rely on the protections, otherwise do not and apply more caution when making control inputs". We don't even know if all this round-the-houses about what does what in which law applies in this case anyway. We know the pilots were aware they were in Alternate Law and we know that the PF made some control inputs that on the face of it make no sense. All we don't know is why - but it seems a select group have already decided it must be the computers' fault, despite the fact that they have no more information than those who are advising "wait and see".
Originally Posted by
CogSim
Software Engineers will tell you its Abstraction. You don't need to know how the transmission works to drive to work everyday.
What has Software Engineering got to do with whether someone knows how the transmission/gearbox (for us Brits) on their car works? I guarantee you that the majority of drivers wouldn't have a clue (and I only know in general terms). Furthermore, abstraction is something that has happened in aviation ever since someone hooked a pitot up to a pneumatically-driven dial. That dial was abstracting the raw information from the pitot tube via a mechanism that translated that into human-readable form. Some of those mechanisms were very much better than others!
Ironically, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" was an early slogan for Apple Computers.
Aside from the fact that, as I've said countless times, the software that runs on aircraft is only a gnat's chuff comparable to what you and I use on our PCs every day, personally I've always considered Apple guilty of what the naysayers here are saying about Airbus - i.e. deliberately obfuscating the workings of the system - in their case to enforce dependency on their retail chain to fix problems.
The difference is that it takes a far lower grade of technician/systems administrator/software engineer (i.e. me) to understand what's going on in a PC or server (which - let's face it - these days is usually a PC) than it does a safety-critical real-time system like those plumbed into aircraft.