Originally Posted by gulfairs
I am and old critter, and the last heavy aircraft(being greater than 12500 kg)
was a DC8 73 and then 747 200 preceded by DC10-30.
Non of these aircraft had all the white mans magic of a dozen different laws etc, just the old ones, Pull stick back equals houses get smaller and push stick forward houses get bigger.
It appears to this fuddled brain, that airbus industries have put so many protection systems in place that the aircraft systems are able to out maneuver the pilots inputs.
...
My point is: maybe we should revert to cable operated controls and switches.
It is interesting to compare the accident rates of the FBW Airbus products against the B747 Classic and DC-10. If we can believe the data on
AirSafe.com, the
Full Loss Equivalent accident rate for the FBW Airbus products is 0.10 fatal accidents per million flights (I summed the flights and FLE for A319 to A380 to get this rate). The B747 Classic rate is 1.02 (roughly 10 times higher) and the DC-10 was 0.64 (roughly 6 times higher). Of course, operational practices have changed significantly over the last 50 years, so even with the same type of aircraft, accident rates today should be much lower than accident rates several decades ago.
Comparing the A319/320/321 against the B737 NG, the rates are identical, at 0.08. Perhaps the type of flight control system is less important to accident rates than some would like to think. Given a particular scenario, you can make an argument that one design is better than another. But, over the whole range of real world scenarios, it all averages out.