Originally Posted by
CONF iture
Fully visible flight control commands place you one step ahead in the thinking process.
If - and *only* if - you see them. Many haven't.
Originally Posted by
CONF iture
Question for you or aguadalte or RF4 or anyone who seems to share my view how the Airbus concept suppresses valuable information : What made Airbus to embrace such philosophy ?
CONF, if you only ask people who already agree with you, you're less likely to learn anything new. Most of the useful stuff I've learned has come from people who either agree partially or don't agree with me at all.
Pretend this isn't coming from me if it helps, but at least one of the reasons for the switch was that the yoke was designed around cable control. Before hydraulic assistance you needed a control column that size to have the leverage to move the flight surfaces. The 737 still requires it because it's manual reversion mode is cable-operated. None of the widebodies did, as they were fully-hydraulic, but it was kept anyway with a complex electro-mechanical feedback system in place. Same with the 757. The 777 and 787 use a software-controlled feedback system, the code for which is in all likelihood more complex than every system on the A320 put together. The A320, like the 757, was a narrowbody that was fully-hydraulic, and therefore one of the main reasons for having a yoke was no longer there.
With a fully-hydraulic system, one of the main reasons for having the controls interconnected - i.e. the need for both pilots to exert leverage when control cables are damaged - also goes away, so Airbus developed a system that would attempt to enforce one pilot in control at all times. Being an airliner and not a trainer, the need for one pilot to feel what the other is doing was greatly reduced, and losing the interconnection also removed the possibility of pilots fighting over the controls or having to work against the force exerted by an incapacitated pilot's body interfering with the yoke.
Being able to see the primary flight control movement buys some time, but only a matter of a second or two, if that. And if a PNF is really unsure about what their colleague is doing, they can take control at the press of a button and lock them out by holding it down (although would only be recommended in extreme circumstances - e.g. EgyptAir 990).
If you come at the problem having already concluded that the yoke is a superior control method in every sense, then you don't find this stuff out because you don't want to. Similarly if someone were to come at it from a conclusion that the SS is better, then they'd close their ears to what you're saying. Believe it or not, I do take on board the advantages the yoke has - but I don't think it's enough to say it's better or safer in every respect, because in some scenarios it clearly isn't.