Originally Posted by
Gretchenfrage
He's from the new Airbus infected generation who are painstakingly forced to eternally repeat, that cockpit architecture and design have nothing, but nothing at all to do with any incident or accident
If it's no Airbus, then it's the aircraft, if it's Airbus then it's the pilots. Basta.
Blimey - not so much a straw man as a veritable Worzel Gummidge! Of course flight deck architecture and design will have a bearing on incidents and accidents, and I suspect Stilton would agree in a heartbeat. Reflexively asserting that linked controls would be better in all scenarios, well - that's a different kettle of fish.
No-one's saying that the Airbus FBW layout has no drawbacks - simply that those drawbacks are less important than you think they are.
To me it's a bit of everything. The MD11 has some weaknesses in aerodynamics, agreed. But it's manageable with skill, just as one should be able to prevent a 330 from stalling.
The MD-11 has weaknesses grandfathered from the DC-10 design - chief among them mounting the main gear directly on to the main spar, which is why several have found themselves upside down after a bounce on landing. I'm certain it is this that Doors To Automatic was referring to, and let's face it, he has a point!
Other aircraft have other weaknesses, some even in cockpit design.
Indeed - for instance, who would have thought that forcing one yoke forward and the other yoke backwards on a 767 would lead to a split elevator condition?
*All* designs have "gotchas", it's in the nature of engineering.
Originally Posted by
Gretchenfrage
No one can prove otherwise. Stats can only be countered by stats.
Having your background in statistics, however, have you ever made one about the modern aircraft with FBW versus fatalities?
As of today, with your statistical argumentation, one FBW aircraft series should be under similar scrutiny, compared to the competitor.
Any number is too big versus 0.
In fact, the numbers for all three widebody FBW types to which you refer are too small to be statistically significant (which I hope you agree is a *good* thing!). As I've said elsewhere, if you combine the number of A330s and A340s there are approx. 20% more of them in service than there are B777s, which to an extent invalidates the kind of absolute numbers you're talking about.
To illustrate the point, the very first fatal widebody hull loss involved the design that was arguably the safest and most advanced (L-1011 EAL401). By 1980 the number of fatal civilian accidents involving widebodies tallied as 2 for the L-1011, 3 for the DC-10 and *6* for the B747 - and yet this tally gives an inaccurate picture because neither of the L-1011 fatals and only one of the B747 fatals were due to purely technical failures.
To cite you once more, "to suggest this is down to bad piloting in the context of these stats is absurd", would mean that there is something wrong with the one product, wouldn't it?
Well now - we can open a can of worms here if you like...
I find it interesting that a minority of pilots (including yourself) consistently denigrate the design coming from a single manufacturer, when even a short period of reviewing the evidence behind most of the mud thrown in that direction can only draw the researcher to the conclusion that most of the controversy is unsubstantiated. And yet the reputation of another manufacturer (McDonnell-Douglas), a company not only proven to have gambled with the lives of passengers and crew in the face of a known and proven design deficiency but also proven to have leveraged political connections to sweep those problems under the carpet, is considered sacrosanct - because they did things the old-fashioned way (and in the process didn't consider the consequences of more than doubling the air volume in a widebody design).
I understand how you feel. I may not be a pilot, but there's not a day that goes by where I don't pine for the way things used to be in my field - bit-flipping on the hardware and being in total control. However, I have to confess that looking at things objectively, the modern technology and processes that help me do my job at the expense of the subjective loss of feeling in control down to the bare metal means that I can get my job done faster, with less hassle and if I'm honest at least 99% of the time a whole load better and more consistent than I could have managed on my own.