Originally Posted by
bearfoil
Dozy, Say I develop an intricate and efficient new line in my production shop, it will streamline my production, cut cost, and widen my market. Something I can be proud of.
I pay the enormous development costs, exercise patience, have it installed, and debugged. It has problems, as do all sophisticated technologies, and it goes on line. Some of the problems have to do with training my personnel, so an expensive and sophisticated system takes care of that.
It works flawlessly. As it happens, there is a fantastically remote chance it may malfunction, which is acknowledged, and workarounds are installed. The workarounds are not modern, and involve a bypass of the new technology onto the old (left in Place) machine.
There are now two methods of avoiding this remote malfunction.
Step One. Do nothing. The machine has a good chance of self correcting.
ALTERNATE. Cycle THIS LEVER, and the line switches to the old machine which has a phenomenally good record with this remote but systemic problem.
In my business, it is called the CRITICAL PATH. Only in my business, if the Path is lost, no-one dies.
I still don't fully understand what you're saying. If this accident had anything at all to do with the control philosophy, automation, FBW or whatever then I could make sense of what you're trying to say.
But in this case no amount of steam gauges, big red buttons to disable the automatics or probably even interconnected yokes would have made a difference. The PF responded to the UAS by pulling back on the stick and inducing a climb to the apogee and stalled, then after a brief moment where he corrected downwards he applied full TOGA power and hauled on the stick for most of the way down to ground contact, making control inputs far in excess of what would have been considered acceptable at cruise altitude. Just the same as with Birgenair the crew were overwhelmed by a situation that ran out of their control. The PNF did not take control, despite having a much better read of the situation and the Captain's advice seemed not to register.