Mountain Bear wrote:
If the technology can't correct for pilot error then it's rubbish technology. That's what FBW is all about. What part of the word "protection" in "flight envelope protections" doesn't you understand. The software is to protect the pilot from screwing up. It didn't. It failed.
People keep talking about pilot error as if that's the conclusion of the matter. Pilot error is just the beginning. Every single major advance in flight safety over the last hundred years has happened because "pilot error" was not an acceptable answer. The fact that the pilots in AF447 screwed up is as obvious as it is irrelevant. The pilot is just one cog in the system. If the system cannot compensate for errors in the system then it isn't a robust system.
While I agree with the general sentiment of your post and that pilot error is just the beginning, you are, in this case, going too far.
Yes: the system should compensate for errors from the pilot but you can't blame the engineers for thinking that a pilot who made it to the right seat of a heavy had mastered stall recovery about 5 hours into his basic flight training.
This isn't a "pilot error" accident. Maintaining nose-up for four minutes in a stall from 37000' is not an ERROR!