Basic control laws
Salute!
After private posts with members of this august group.......
Make no mistake, I do not advocate an instant reversion to direct commands of the control surfaces using an RC model logic. The FBW implementation allows many "tweaks" that we did not have in the fully-hydraulic systems that we lites flew 50 years ago. Even into the 90's, the heavies had actual mechanical connections to some things - imagine that?
My philosophy is a bottom-up control law that the humans can depend upon regardless of all the bells and whistles and so-called "protections" provided in the higher-tier modes.
It appears to this old fossil that the 'bus has really fine aero characteristic. Otherwise, I would have expected a spin or some weird maneuver. So I question all the bank angle "protections", the seeming multiple AoA "protection" modes, and the beat goes on.
With autopilot engaged, all of the neat features seem logical for reducing workload and making things nice for the SLF's. But when things turn to worms, there has to be a basic, core control law that utilizes all the benefits of FBW and yet exploits the aero design/characteristics of the jet.
As with OK, don't take my seat-of-the-pants sensors away from me. I shall overcome the "leans" in prolonged IMC with no autopilot engaged and maintaining 10 or 15 feet from my flight lead. Some glances at the ADI and other gauges shall save me from my belief that I had been flying inverted for the last 3 minutes, heh heh.
In my second career ( afer hanging up the g-suit), I worked mostly on the crew-vehicle interfaces for the more advanced jets. Working with the end-users, we always had a straightforward means of going to a well-understood, basic display or mode. One of my "laws" was "if you don't like what you see, hit another button". our sfwe engineers implemented extremely rigid state machines that simply would not do weird things based upon weird inputs. If an input was not defined, the machine just sat there waiting for another switch or aero condition or seeker acquisition or ..... If you wanted to start over, then we had the 'start over"button, heh heh.
later,