Originally Posted by
BOAC
In order to 'dumb down' the art of flying an aeroplane the manufacturers have created large blinkers for crew to wear.
The design is not about "dumb[ing] down", and never was. If you look at things with that assumption then aspects of the design will look that way - but that assumption was applied after the fact by pilots who took too much notice of BZ and not enough of Gordon Corps.
Autotrim exists in this system primarily for the very reason you describe - namely the passive sticks. Before we get away from ourselves, it's worth bearing in mind that it has worked just fine for millions of flights over 26 years in service. We are looking at a single anomaly here, and one in which the controls as applied were *way* outside what should have been attempted even in an emergency situation.
Perhaps it should become an early "must-know" aspect of Airbus FBW conversion training (if it isn't already) that when you're using the stick to fly the aircraft manually, you're affecting trim as well as elevator position.
Circling back to the initial point, the design was not an exercise in "dumbing down", it was simply one possible solution for aircraft control when given the opportunity of a "clean room" design. In a hypothetical scenario where aviation began in 1983 rather than 1903 (and materials/computing tech were unaffected), what the '80s Wright Brothers may have come up with would not look like the 1903 Flyer - it'd probably be a carbon-fibre job festooned with digital technology and operated in an entirely alien manner. With autotrim we're looking at an aspect of the Airbus design (specific to the A330/340 in fact) that *may* have made things a little more difficult, but has done so only once in however many million hours of flying the type has done. Seems a little excessive to say the overall design was a mistake based on that single incident, does it not?