Originally Posted by
ChristiaanJ
IIRC (it was a long time back), "airbus" in those early days was a generic term we used for widebody-shorthaul-twin designs in general, until "Airbus" snapped up the term and made it a trade mark.
In fact it was a narrowbody specification originally (in 1965 - see link in previous post), but I imagine that the design quickly became a widebody with the advent of all major US manufacturers introducing theirs. The UK had their own proposal in the form of the BAC Two-Eleven, but ultimately this was squelched politically in favour of buying US-made designs in.
Sorry, but "autotrim" is not an AB idea. It's much older than that. Concorde had an auotrim system, and apart from having to do some clever tweaking during flight testing, it never really was a problem. But then the Concorde pitch trim had the "bicycle bell", so you knew when it was doing its job.
Well, you can know when it's doing it's job on the FBW Airbus as well, all you have to do is glance inboard. I suspect that given the near-constant operation an audio warning would have quickly become a nuisance - which is not to say that an audio warning
when the trim goes past a certain point would be a bad idea - if any change was to be made, I think that would be the one to go for.
CJ's well aware of this, but the initial sidestick development and testing was done on a Concorde airframe. Someone kindly provided me the documentation, but I lack the requisite French to read it thoroughly. Maybe one day...
@jcj - This is only my opinion, but if someone decided that by, as you say "reading between the lines", then they got it wrong. The only training cost that the FBW Airbus series was designed to reduce was *conversion between types* by keeping a virtually identical flight-deck layout throughout the range.