Originally Posted by
CONF iture
And you still did not get what would be the purpose of a DIRECT switch for the Airbus.
Some crews would have loved to have one :
I have always wondered why there wasn't one - there is no engineering difficulty as it is there on test flights (they always start test flight program in direct and then add FCS laws in).
I wonder if it has to do with certification, in response to one of my previous posts some have suggested that the reversion laws are not tested in compliance with the regs (and special conditions) but only as failure conditions. If so, maybe putting it there as a pilot option makes the certification more complicated. Note: that would all be stupid IMHO, but then I thought that each reversion law would have meet certification standards in itself.
If it was there, I am not sure it would help much though - the Boeing one is apparently little used if ever - and it might just become another way to put blame back onto the pilot. After all (thinking about LOC with a flyable aircraft), if the crew punches out to direct law and still crashes it will be their fault, while if they could have done but didn't, and it might have helped, then same again.
I think you are being unfair on them there. I am pretty sure that Airbus at the time thought that contemporary engineering technology wasn't up to it. I have seen other research that concludes that that was still the the case some years later. I am pretty sure that what Airbus thought was that the benefits of sidestick and C* fbw would outweigh that disadvantage. In terms of accident rates, I would suggest that time has proved them correct in that (or at least that there was no significant overall safety disadvantage).
The developer of the new sidestick is BAE Systems, by the way, and if you go back 30 years, guess which commercial aircraft consortium they were part of ? What is happening with sidesticks now is exactly what Airbus did then - contemporary military tech is being migrated to civil, but when Airbus did it, contemporary was passive.
At some point Airbus will need to weigh catching up with the rest of the world against maintaining interface compatibility across its model range (which it has made a big selling point) - perils of being a first-mover. Boeing will need to too, because if I had to bet I'd say the future pilot interface looks like (better) sidesticks, fbw, and moving thrust levers - and neither A or B called it totally right.
Most interesting thing (and it is difficult to judge for a few pictures) for me is that the active sidestick units look to be physically smaller than the Airbus passive spring units - probably due to major advances in actuator tech. If so, given that the rest of the puzzle is software, a retrofit might even be possible - from an engineering POV, I doubt it ever will be from commercial.