Hi John,
Anyone who feels 'out of the loop' flying an Airbus FBW product needs to take a look at themselves rather than the aeroplane design.
Have the authors of this paper got it completely wrong then?
Pilots in the loop? Airbus and the FBW side stick « Critical Uncertainties
"A key cognitive engineering flaw
The decision to use passive controllers unfortunately introduced a cognitive engineering design error in the form of the absence of tactile feedback to the pilots. This in turn transferred the behavioural cue from the tactile (hands on stick) to the visual channel of the pilots, with the design implementation further translating the cue from an analog kinaesthetic to visual symbolic form, which in turn requires higher levels of cognitive processing. This visual cue then competes for attentional resources in the visual channel and requires additional ‘mental bandwidth’ (e.g. symbology requires abstract processing) to handle. The net result an ineffective coordination mechanism under high stress conditions."
There is no feed back through the Thrust Levers in auto thrust or TOGA LOCK. More competition for 'mental bandwidth'.