Originally Posted by
TTex600
Dozy, I'm through going counter point - point with you. You argue like a politician. You restate your opponents questions into the question you want to answer.
Not at all - I think I answered them pretty directly.
I never mentioned autopilot turn control in a conventional airliner. I stated this in post #613: "As long as the FBW is in normal law, the SS is nothing more than a autopilot input device.
Well, that is fundamentally incorrect as the FCU is *not* an autopilot. It is a
flight control unit and feel system which is slightly smarter than the previous generation (which went into the A300, B757, B767 and MD-11). You may choose to see it that way, but that doesn't make it true. If the sidestick simply input to the autopilot it would be routed through the FMS (which is a completely different and separate system manufactured by a third party, usually Honeywell), which it isn't.
Adding a bank request through the SS is the same as turning the heading select knob on the flight control panel. Both actions result in the autopilot turning the aircraft".
Again, incorrect - because the sidestick is not routed through the FMS and never has been, and also incorrect in a more material sense because the heading select knob orders a manouevre that is limited by the FMS in terms of turn rate and bank angle. With the sidestick you can command any bank angle (and consequent turn rate) up to 67 degrees, which is the limit of the flight envelope as discovered in testing.
Nowhere in that statement did I in any way compare the SS to an conventional (your word - which I find quite ironic)autopilot turn control.
Well, you didn't specify make or model of aircraft, so I went with the most generic term - so sue me.
I'm not trying to annoy you or start an argument here, I'm just pointing out that you have a fundamental misconception as to how the Airbus control and autoflight systems are implemented.
Originally Posted by
SLFinAZ
"Old School" professional pilots tended to have a military pedigree and while that might entail other issues by and large they had a very well qualified "stick and rudder" skill set.
Tell that to those poor buggers in that B-52. Also, if you have a look in AH&N, you'll find a number of posts that relate to the early days of BEA and BOAC - the ex-WW2 pilots were known as "the barons", and some of them literally scared their junior officers with the chances they'd take and their apparent lack of knowledge of their limitations. Military training has one more problem as well, and that is ingrained adherence to chain-of-command. The F/O on the ill-fated Palm 90 flight was a former Navy pilot, I believe, and the CVR in that case shows that he was aware something was not right, but never felt he could contradict his Captain even though his Captain came up via turboprops and small charters in FL, and his own experience was in fast jets.
The philosophical move away from aviation skill set to a sophisticated software designed to minimize or eliminate "pilot error" has led to less and less qualified pilots overall IMO. Flying will always entail risk and anything that minimizes a pilots actual ability to handle that other .01% will eventually come into play. The moment that "automatics" went from being an aid to the pilot and became a replacement aviation went backward 50 years.
But that was never the case - you show me a single trade-level article proving that automation was designed to minimise pilot ability or replace the pilot in the cockpit, and I'll give you that point, but the fact is even in the early days that was not the intent at Airbus or anywhere else. If the current breed of MBA jockeys running airlines have decided that should be the case then it is their fault, and not that of Airbus. People obviously forget the flipside of FBW development which was that the protections actually allow pilots to perform things like evasive maneouvres more safely. FBW has nothing to do with autoflight reliance either - those are two completely different aspects of modern airliners, and as I said, it was Boeing who popularised the latter with the B757 and B767 (the A300 had it first, but it's market share was too small to make much of a difference on it's own).