I shall take on
Cland here, not as much for honor, but for experience and no small amount of aero knowledge for a "dumb fighter pilot".
To wit:
Airbus' is "same, same but different". It has no G-trim, it is flightpath stable. So no need to trim it in climb or pull in turns. Stick free, it follows the flightpath.
The normal law and the alternate laws are not "attitude" biased as one would expect in the old days of the autopilot "attitude hold" mode. The thing is programmed to hold a gee! In Normal, the pitch attitude is taken into account, so it does not try to hold one perfect gee if in a climb or descent, but whatever gee is required for the pitch attitude. So in some sense, it has an attitude function built in. Once outta Normal, it appears to be strictly a gee command with pitch rates blended. AoA seems absent to any large degree.
Make no mistake. I do not advocate the same control laws we had in the first operational FBW jet ever flown ( can't resist the plug, heh heh). A trimmed gee is not a good thing for the heavy transports, IMHO. More AoA bias seems better, but what the hell do I know.
Yet, all the time there are many airmen still learning from the books of yesteryear, unable to tell which chapters still apply and which not so they keep on seriously discussing about pitch-up of swept wings when stalled, aileron reversals, coffin corners... almost as if MiG-17 is the current state of the art.
Good observation,
Cland.
About the Mig-17..... Some of my friends had the chance to fly the sucker, and it behaved exactly as expected ( there's a place in Nevada that has "funny" airplanes). Some controls had direct linkages to the surfaces ( augmented on a few), but it was honest and let you know when getting close to trouble. Funniest thing was the back stick pressure above about 4 gees - feet on dashboard and both hands pulling back, heh heh). You can ask some of my friends that encountered it in 'nam and they will tell you about how good it was in a manuevering fight, and in last year or two they took advantage of its bad characteristics.
Well... no. Aerodynamically it is stable yet with FBW intervention in ALT2 law, where low and high speed stability are lost (as is expected when there is no reliable speed measurement), it does not become neutral but unstable.
Wrong. Aero is aero, and the FBW system can only do so much. I do not believe that the jet becomes unstable, only that there is an AoA and cee gee combo that enables it to reach a stable, stalled condition that we did not realize was possible.
All the data I have seen shows that the 'bus does not have an AoA/cee gee combination that makes the jet unstable. The intervention by FBW laws, limits, protections can only do so much. In my case, we were actually unstable until about 0.95M. So HAL took care of us, but enabled fabulous pitch rates, sustained turn rates, sustained gee and such that had never been seen.
For all:
I joined this fray to provide some perspective of FBW evolution and its good things and insidious bad things.
I respect the pilots here and hope to meet a few one time for a few beers before I pass on.