Originally Posted by
taildrag
Years ago, I attended an aviation psychology symposium at Ohio State University, when "FBW" and automation by Airbus was still in the development stages, and FBW was still markedly controversial.
One of the speakers said that the software was very complex, having to contend with untold combinations of conditions (such as which warnings to inhibit on the takeoff role, to prohibit rejected takeoffs for non-critical events). Inevitably,he speculated, automation would act "unreasonably" and cause problems in some unforeseeable situations.
Funnily enough, my old Prof. (who is sadly no longer with us) was very much of that mindset. In fact he was an out-and-out sceptic for years, and being a specialist in software reliability a lot of people took him seriously. A visit to Toulouse:
Report on visit to Airbus Industrie - 28-29th Jan. 1993
ended up softening his attitude slightly, but he'd never sanction being complacent about the subject.
The long and the short of it though, is that a lot of those worries were unfounded. Difference in thrust lever/throttle behaviour between Airbus and other types is a mere conversion issue (there is no such thing as a 'standard flight deck'), and Airbus never designed the automation hardware. That task went to Honeywell - incidentally the same people who made FMS units for Boeing.
