Originally Posted by studi
We are waiting for your well thought out explanation why autotrim OVERALL is such a bad feature to have after Clandestino very well showed how hard it is to deal on a conventional plane with stall situations.
Actually, that's not what I meant to convey. What I wanted to point out is that the crew that has lost situational awareness and is unable to regain it will make a mess out of flying no matter if flying FBW, conventional or "conventional" aeroplane. Manual or automatic trim also doesn't have much impact if the pilots don't know what is going on and what they need to do.
Originally Posted by studi
The Airbus is a very easy plane to handfly in normal and alternate law, and would also have been in case of AF447. It is also easy to fly in direct law, but of course with the additional task of trimming.
True, with a bunch of caveats. I'll just list two I find the most important:
1. It is easy for you, it was easy for me (while it lasted) and is supposed to be easy for anyone earning sustenance by plowing the atmosphere in Airbus. Catch is that to get to the point where we started considering it to be easy it took some inborn ability, a lot of dedication, hard work and time. It's quite usual to concentrate on the present and forget the efforts that went into getting where we are now.
2. Easy to fly in everyday operation doesn't automatically translate into easy to fly when things go rough, but factor here is pilot who gets distracted by the fear into forgetting the basics of control maintenance, not the aeroplane. So no amount of handflying form ToD to touchdown can prepare you to handfly when AP quits out of its own accord in not quite optimal circumstances. Thanks to much better engineered and maintained aeroplanes, today we have a bunch of pilots that retired without ever having an emergency but we also have few who were so excited by their first occurrence late in their careers they have turned it into disaster and many an observer was puzzled by what was superficially labelled as "beginner's mistake" e.g. being so obsessed by need to prepare the cabin for landing with unsafe gear as to allow the aeroplane to run out of fuel. So neither experience or handflying practice by themselves can prevent future AF447-like accidents.