some good points F4Retired but...
human nature has been taken care of to a certain degree but not completely. We must move away from this "I must have ultimate control" flawed logic.
In the early days of military FBW there were a number of relevant events.
One in particular comes to mind. One FBW fighter had an onboard system which prevented spins and stalls. One particular fighter pilot felt this system limited his dog fighting abilities and so disabled it. "I must have ultimate control". He promptly crashed overcooking it.
Yet that itself doesn't really indicate anything. Had he been shot down with the system enabled that was wrong too.
If the pilot has the ultimate responsibility for the souls on board, he has to do be able to use all available means the system can provide. I would that not call ultimate control, just give the pilots all methods and systems available to do the decision making and to transfer his conclusion into action. And put the pilot in the loop by all means and all human channels and senses.
So we need other indicators of a working safe system.
Those would be?
The A320 is one of the safest commercial airliners out there. So it has proven both its safety and design features. This is a fundamentally safe aircraft minus stick feedback and throttle feedback. Tells us a lot.
Would it get more unsafe in your opinion with feedback? Why not add feedback and an AOA gauge for aditional safety?
I do not advocate engineers have it 100% right and one of my earlier posts called for more forward thinking pilots in order to improve on what we have. Fundamentally safe technology.
I could agree more with your points if we were talking about unsafe technology. We are however in the safest period of commercial flying ever. The overwhelming majority of a/c are new technology. This is no coincidence.
That is again a thinking in statistics and probabilities, i wont accept. Any near accident is too much, any accident is a waste. Why not improve things some more despite the relative high safety? Money? Pride? Neglecence?
By the way, its not A vs. B, its make things safer when you know how.
Analogue Boeings have stalled and crashed, Boeing pilots have been confused by blocked pitot and static ports and crashed. None of your AOA indications, stick shakers, yoke feedback helped in any way at all. Its pure nonsense, sorry but it is.
What do you want to proove with this statement?
Cars continue to crash despite antiskid and other gimmicks, but nobody would come to the idea to remove those systems or to build a new car without them. Aircraft with or without FBW and with or without all obove mentioned systems and helpers will crash, human race will not be able to produce and operate a failsafe system of any kind. Its just a matter of time and circumstances until anything fails. But it is necessary to improve systems and training out of expierience, develop it further and make it safer.
To deprive the ultimate responsible instance in the cockpit (the pilot, if you forgot) a very important information by disabling the feedback channel (tactile feedback to the hand, which executes the inputs) and saturating other channels with the information (like eyes or ears) does not make things safer.
Where I totally agree with you is on the together bit. But that requires many of you letting go of the past.
If you forgot, we come from the past, everything we have and every development does not found on the future, but on past systems and past expierience. If you disregard the past, you let go of vital expierience and learn it the hard way again. To work it out together, the engineering side has to accept the expierience of the expierienced pilots and the success of previous designs. This expierience is the living one, not the one by death toll. They used tactile feedback and survived with it. No one complained about it being present and no one told the industrie, that we dont need it any more, develop some aircraft without it.
The expierienced pilots from the past having flown with tactile feedback may be the least affected by the absence of this channel, they can work around with their expierience in flying (and handflying) in the past. The young kids like that one in the right seat have no fall back pposition available when the sh++t hits the fan, when they are saturated by alarms, whistles, bells, different coloured displays in the absence of otherwise present navigation and aviation helpers. Then a simple UAS event with a AP+AThr dropout, a slight (pitot induced) altitude deviation coupled with some roll tendency leads to a breakdown of situational awareness.
That is not a training issue alone, it is a problem to tune in the pilot into the system and to keep him in the loop from normal operation to the biggest f****up possible.
And this is also an engineering task, wether you like it or not.
franzl