Mr Optimistic
Now that is optimistic!
A fully reinforced (i.e. duplicated) flight crew would be preferable, ceteris paribus, but there are the same cost issues that ended the flight engineer (who would also have to be reinforced). Even a relief CDB and F/O is not the end of it, because you have the Van Zanten/Meurs CRM issue at the other end of the spectrum to AF447.
Takata set out the AF procedures at the time of AF447, and how the junior F/O in the RHS came to automatically become PIC. Interesting, and thankfully no more....
DozyWannabe
There will be nothing "incontrovertible" about AF447! Look at the number of pages on this secondary thread....
I believe, and have strong views on the point, that the need after Stony Point was to ram into every pilot's head that, before discounting a stick shaker (yoke or SS), that an uncorrected stall = death. End of. Be absolutely certain, as you watch your VSI plummet.
A SS with the same function is not a philosophical problem for me, even if it is to others, but a deadstick makes me nervous. As you state, you can land an A330 "glider" with a deadstick and airmanship. It is the additional scanning at the moment of maximum stress in an emergency that is unwelcome, when feedback and interconnectivity aid cockpit discipline in a cockpit that needs assistance.
If Boeing and Airbus, in unison (even if they preferred feedback yokes and feedback SSs respectively), had addressed stall issues, I would like to think that 9L/CJC 3407 could have been avoided (let alone AF447).
I have some difficulty with any argument from anybody on this forum that, if the LHS SS had been moving in tandem with the RHS SS as a result of the PF's inputs, it would have made no difference to what the PNF would have said and done (particularly in the initial critical pre-stall phase). PNF was "nagging" PF, without such feedback assistance, instead of calling the UAS drill.....
P.s. re: "design" - I mean the totality of that paragraph. What Gordon "signed off" is not necessarily what he would have preferred, and he could not possibly have envisaged the industry changes over several decades on the human interface issues that have arisen.
P.p.s. I would almost go so far as to secondary alarm the THS trim wheel whenever you depart from normal law in an AB, to keep the flight crew cognisant of the manual trim issues.
Last edited by Welsh Wingman; 26th Aug 2011 at 23:11.