Originally Posted by
CriticalUncertainty
I'm the author (there's just one of me) of the work quoted by GoldenRivett above
Welcome to the forum.
there is IMO sufficient evidence in the form of ATSB and NTSB reports to indicate that it is a less than effective implementation
I'd argue that the implementation is at least as effective as the alternatives for the reasons I mentioned above (particularly the unexpected side effects of dual input in the B767 as evidenced in EgyptAir 990).
I'd note that at the time I wrote it I hadn't seen the AF447 final report, which is why it's not referenced, again in that incident we see the same behaviour.
And yet there are other incidents involving aircraft with linked controls where the same thing happened (e.g. Birgenair 301, West Caribbean 708).
I'd also note that the work by Corps (1988) was written by an insider to the Airbus program about the Airbus teams experiences with FBW and side-stick controller, you cannot really get a more contemporaneous and pertinent source than that.
Indeed, but I'd argue you're quoting him out of context to make your point. If you were to take a look at my earlier posts, you'll see that I'm well aware who Gordon Corps was - in fact he's something of a hero of mine. His experience with the control setup actually goes all the way back to the Concorde "minimanche" experiments of the '70s and early '80s, when he was still at the ARB.
As far as the design of the Airbus FBW control system goes, the overriding ethos of the design was to use technological advancements to build a fleet of aircraft whose degree of similarity in terms of flight deck layout and handling characteristics would be unprecedentedly consistent across all types, from the short-haul narrowbody to the long-haul widebody. Because of the need to support legacy types, this was something that Boeing and MD couldn't hope to match, and in business terms, looking back across 27 years, it seems that Airbus were remarkably prescient.
The tendency for a group of pilots to react negatively to such changes is nothing new. If you go back to D.P. Davies' "Handling The Big Jets", he notes that a number of pilots fought the introduction of stick pushers tooth-and-nail. Hell, you can go all the way back to Eddie Rickenbacker's decision not to have autopilots fitted to Eastern's fleet at the time of their introduction - which ended up being rescinded very quickly!