Originally Posted by
stilton
Apart from weight savings what are the advantages of non linked sidesticks with no feedback and non back driven autothrottles ?
What are the advantages, when the link between the command method and the response are entirely electronic?
Originally Posted by
peekay4
Airbus had to fight hard to get digital FBW accepted by civil aviation authorities
...
And a big reason Airbus pushed so hard for certification was because the chief proponent of the sidestick system was none other than the CEO's son, who had been a military pilot.
Rubbish.
Look, we've been through this before. The reason two/three crew airliners which had direct cable control had those controls duplicated and replicated was so that in the event of an external control problem, the muscle power of both pilots could be used to rectify the issue. Having one side feel what the other side was doing through the tactile channel was a side-effect only. Once hydraulic-assist (and eventually all-hydraulic) controls became the norm, there was no fundamental need for one side to mimic the other, as the flight surface deflection was entirely down to the hydraulic systems.
In fact, in modern airliners with an all-hydraulic linked yoke system, abnormal configurations may not result in the outcome that many would expect (e.g. EgyptAir 990, where one yoke forward and the other back resulted in a split-elevator condition).
The Airbus FBW passive sidestick design grew out of the Concorde "minimanche" experiments in the late '70s. The decision to go with a passive design was as much a result of the potential safety benefits (e.g. in an incapacitation scenario) as it was anything else. Yes, avoiding technological complexity was an issue - but it was far from the only issue. Remember that one of the primary people behind the development and evaluation of the design was Gordon Corps - Dai Davies' successor at the ARB/CAA. It follows that the design decision was absolutely not based on economic considerations alone.
The presence of force-feedback on the B777's PFCs is in fact the reason that design requires a bypass mode (the oft-discussed "Big Red Button") for safety reasons while the Airbus design does not. The bypass mode exists purely to counter the scenario in which the computer controlling the force-feedback may fail.
Originally Posted by
Bkdoss
There have been cases when as a copilot I get to land the aircraft and despite me being confident to pull off a safe landing, the skipper impulsively plays around with the controls.
A skipper doing that in a FBW Airbus can expect tea and biscuits with the chief pilot at best, and the heave-ho at worst. The design absolutely requires the handling pilot to be the only one manipulating the controls at any given time. To be fair, that should really be the case on any type. If the Captain feels the landing may be beyond the capabilities of the FO, they've got to follow the book and brief accordingly.