Originally Posted by
vapilot2004
Really? The Ziegler family must have been incredibly powerful promoters of themselves.
I don't know about Henri, but Bernard Ziegler was known to be something of an inveterate self-publicist. In fact that has a lot to do with the reason Airbus made him VP of Engineering during the advent of the A320. I should point out to peekay4 that as far as I know BZ is in fact still with us, but last I heard he wasn't in the best of health.
...much of the media coverage has Bernard acknowledged as a key figure in the Airbus FBW design. The FSF award text seems to be fairly clear on BZ's influence:
Right - he was the VP of Engineering and thus the person with whom the buck stopped in terms of high-level specification, but he was not a nuts-and-bolts engineer. Furthermore as I said, the sidestick design grew out of the Concorde "minimanche" experiments which BZ had no involvement with to the best of my knowledge. BZ may have championed the notion of using the fruits of that work in the A320, but he did not come up with the idea and he did not have a direct hand in the implementation.
Was the redoubtable Flight Safety Foundation (and Flight Global and the French government) so out of touch with reality that they too were taken in by some sort of subterfuge?
No, but the media do tend to like a simple narrative when the truth of the matter is rather more prosaic. So in much the same way as, for example, Bill Gates is credited with inventing MS-DOS (he didn't) and Steve Jobs is credited with inventing the Apple Macintosh (he actively avoided the project in favour of his pet project "Lisa", which flopped) - articles tend to associate BZ with Airbus FBW when in fact he was more of an enabler and figurehead than someone actively involved day-to-day in the project. Of course he would chair the development meetings with the aero, software and pilot engineering groups and he probably had final say in arbitration, but that's about it as I understand it.
I would like to know more about Mr. Corps. Any references DW or recommended reading? Thank you! If Gordon Corps was the true "father" of FBW as opposed to M. Ziegler, then a terrible injustice and misinformation campaign bordering on fraud seems to be happening here.
Heh - I'd argue that's a bit melodramatic! As I said above, the truth is somewhat prosaic. The Concorde "minimanche" experiments and the development of the A320's flight deck and systems from that work were a long-term evolutionary and collaborative effort involving large teams led by the best people Airbus could hire - there is no individual "father" of Airbus FBW. Captain Corps was, as I said, D.P. Davies' successor at the ARB, and according to CliveL (resident Concorde engineer), he became the ARB's Chief Test Pilot for Concorde - hence his involvement with the "minimanche" project and his subsequent poaching by Airbus, presumably for that very reason (after all, who better to lead development of the technology for production than the person who had more experience of it - both theoretical and practical - than any other person on Earth?).
If you've read "Handling The Big Jets", then you'll know that the ARB role required a polymath who was not only well-versed in physics and engineering, but was also a "pilot's pilot" who could explain the technical ins-and-outs in understandable terms and had an innate feel for aircraft and their behaviour. In short, at Airbus it fell to Capt. Corps to mediate between the ground-based engineers and his pilot engineering team, as well as being the lead test pilot who would take the aircraft up and be able to give feedback to the other teams.
Here's a FlightGlobal article from 1987 - you'll note that while Bernard Ziegler is the one giving the high-level overview, when it comes to actual technical information and flight characteristics, it's Gordon Corps they're talking to :
airbus industrie | 1987 | 0873 | Flight Archive
And here's the man himself giving a tour of the A320's FBW systems during a test flight:
You may be wondering why he's not better-known, and here's where the story gets sad. After the A320 went into service, Capt. Corps transferred to head up the flight safety department at Airbus. In 1992 a Thai Airways A310 crashed in the Himalayas, and true to form from what I've been told, he insisted on heading the team and visiting the site personally. While on-site he developed altitude sickness and passed away - he was only 62.
Not only was this a tragic and premature loss in itself, but it was a massive loss to aviation - he never did get to write his own book, and without his innate ability to bridge the gap between the piloting and engineering worlds there arose a lot of misunderstandings in the piloting arena regarding the Airbus FBW systems he helped develop. This was not helped by the ongoing vendetta that the French SNPL pilots' union have been waging in the press against Airbus since the '70s - in fact I'd argue that it's largely down to their efforts that Bernard Ziegler and his foibles have come to be more associated with Airbus FBW than the (from what I've been told) down-to-earth and meticulous character that Capt. Corps was.
I follow this line of thinking if we are discussing a fighter where there is only one control stick, but on a transport aircraft it seems odd to me.
Could you elaborate as to why you think it's odd? Sure, it was a departure from the
de facto standard but from an engineering standpoint it makes sense. As far as Airbus were concerned it made commercial sense too, because it meant that their entire fleet could share an unprecedented level of flight deck commonality and handling characteristics whether you were flying a short-haul narrowbody or a long-haul widebody - something that Boeing and MD would be unable to match.
Could you recommend some books on the history of the Airbus FBW development? ... there seems to be very little published on Airbus history (as opposed to voluminous materials published on the players aerospace, both large and small in the US) and I am not sure why that is, although several theories have been offered in attempts account for this.
Well, one of the reasons there aren't many books on the subject is that the person best qualified to write one died before he had the chance. It's a tragic shame.