Flagon and JoeyBalls
FBW and Normal Law provide protections that have saved a lot of aircraft, passengers and pilot careers. You need to recognise and appreciate this. Secondary to that, both FBW and Normal Law attempt to achieve flying efficiency. Passengers fly more comfortably, fuel is saved and control surfaces and other components are never over taxed because FBW tries its best to maintain a 1G load. In other words, under normal operating conditions, the aircraft is optimised and constrained to be flown in exactly the way the manufacture intended. 99.99999% of flights take-off and land successfully without issue because of the above feat. This is why despite some recent accidents, it remains one of the safest aircraft out there and why current order lists are double that of the 737! Understand and appreciate this too.
Certain failure cases result in the pilot having to adjust himself from top-gun mode to “Use your brain” mode. Not all acts of heroism involve wrestling with the controls to forcefully decide which trajectory an aircraft will follow. It’s a case of brain over brawn. If one is flying straight and level and suddenly loses 100 kts of airspeed with a stall warning, it’s not because god sucked through a straw and left us in a vacuum. We do not need to pitch down because we are not in a stall. If the aircraft does the same, that doesn’t mean we are exempt from the same requirement to perform a bit of critical thinking. The warning is spurious, regardless if we are in control or the aircraft (at that point). We need to determine the nature of the spurious warnings quickly and to do that we have a whole plethora of inputs and sensors to give an indication of airspeed. Diagnosis is required and suitable action after that. This is what the Airbus AD seeks to achieve.
Granted, the ADs are late, but do again consider there have only been a handful of ADR/AOA related issues in 30 years of operation. More 737s flipped over on their backs as a result of a faulty rudder mechanism back in the 80s/90s before Boeing even acknowledged the problem.
Last edited by Superpilot; 6th Jan 2015 at 14:55.