I think the continuous references to "HAL" have misled some people into thinking that the Airbus flight control system is far more capable, in the sense of intelligent, than it is. It's actually fundamentally very conservative in design, only flies the aeroplane itself in quite benign parts of the flight envelope, and uses simple rules (albeit perhaps in too many combinations for some peoples' tastes) for its protections. It would be a massive change to give it the capability to reliably identify spins, quite possibly in the presence of sensor failures or anomalies, and then somehow act like the autopilot to end all autopilots in recovering from that spin, without the benefit of prior data on spin characteristics and best recovery methods. It's not going to happen, at least anytime soon.
Last edited by HeavyMetallist; 19th Jan 2015 at 12:18.