From excite:
Many modern aircraft cannot be directly hand flown as they are aerodynically unstable by design e.g. f117.
I must take exception, as I flew the first operational jet intentionally designed to have negative static stability belore 0.95M, and was fully FBW with zero mechanical anything connected to the control surfaces. You can see my bio on the info for we posters, unlike 99% of those who post here.
The Concorde prolly led us, but still had a few cables or whatever, maybe tabs controlled by cables.
Even the 'bus is not unstable, tho it does allow a cee gee back further than would be approved 40 years ago.
I cannot find a single commercial jet or more than one ot two military designs that cannot be flown with out cosmic computers, protections and such.
Although the computers or "boxes" shape the signals to the control surfaces, being hydraulic pressure or electronic waveforms, most jets fly today exactly as they did 60 years ago. So my jets 50 years ago used hydraulics, but the valves had shapes that did not provide a 1:1 pressure change for each pound/degree of displacement. Those early jets also had neat dampers that used gyros and/or rate sensors to dampen things. So dutch roll was not a biggie for we clueless jocks.
We even had "protections"!! No kidding. My Voodoo back in the 60's had an AoA limiter and then a 28 pound pusher on the stick if we exceeded 'X" Aoa or a certain pitch rate closse to the AoA limit. Sucker worked like a charm, although that beast provided awesome warning before the stall/pitchup - wing rock, hard buffet, etc. No roll protections, but what the hell. On other jets we had stick shakers or duddr vibrators or......
So the "manual" advocvate folks here have it close, but I am not convinced many of the nuggets have their basic skills burned-in by hours of practice and exposure to the dark side of things in their planes.
The practice of "engage otto" at 300 feet with gear up and the reverse when landing bugs me beyond anything. I don't feel all should be Chuck Yeager, but if we can't fly the profile without using otto, then we should not be flying at all. I used and expounded otto for a few thousand hours in single-seaters to reduce workload when wx or other problems arose. But I never flew a profile that I had to use otto versus my own skills/eperience, and remember that otto has ZERO experience.
out