Originally Posted by
Machinbird
The engineers are going to have to get involved and chase down all the new logic branches and implications.
This is true, but...
Dozy, You are overthinking this.
I can assure you I am not. Part of the reason my old Prof was so leery of computer controlled and managed aircraft in the first place was the sheer amount of complexity required to cover, if not all eventualities, then at least a significant majority of them - and then regression-test the software and hardware to prove reliability to a level required by aviation regulations. Remember this was the '80s - when every line of code had to count, and the hardware specifications called for technology that was obsolete even by the standards of the time.
His visit to Toulouse left him impressed with the lengths that they had gone to to do so, and he worked that into the things he taught us, but even with all that he remained neutral on the subject. I'm slightly more sanguine than he was, but that does not mean that I'm naive to the possibility of problems.
They started with a bad premise the first time. That AOA was a function of Airspeed and other parameters. It is really an independent variable.
But we do not know they started with that premise - all we know is how the eventual design ended up. Given what I was taught, the design is likely to be the way it is probably for a very good reason. What we have here is an edge case where that design decision may not have helped matters. What we don't know is the number of times where that design decision may have helped in a situation where the flight envelope was not compromised in such an extreme manner.