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Comment by epochwolf | Hacker News Reader

The problem with the Airbus series of aircraft is that the flight computer has the ultimate authority with flight controls. The flight computer can actually override the pilot if it senses the pilot was attempting to fly outside of programmed limits. Now I would hope that it would release control when it detected a problem, especially when three airspeed sensors are reporting erroneous data.

I wonder if this leaves the pilots too dependent on the computer and therefore didn't know how to fix the problems or if the computer itself caused the crash. I could be completely wrong about this. I don't have any experience with flying, I'm just putting out ideas.

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This sounds a heck of a lot like the drive by wire issues Toyota is having.

As technologist we should have a healthy distrust of any software. It's simply too complex to predict.

Is it corporation group-think that causes them to ignore this? Or hubris? I can't imagine they are that stupid.

"The problem with the Airbus series of aircraft is that the flight computer has the ultimate authority with flight controls."

Where do you have any evidence for this? As the article points out, once the speed indicators diverged, the flight computer on AF447 put itself into an alternate mode where almost all of the overrides you refer to were turned off.

At that point you're basically flying the plane directly, except that hydraulics are moving the flight surfaces for you.

"Where do you have any evidence for this?"

This is a design feature of modern FBW systems. It will not let the plane exit the safety envelope. Simply put, the pilot can put the plane through more acceleration than the frame can handle (the control surfaces are big enough), thus the plane could break apart at high speed without the FBW.

You are right for the rest, the flight computer passed control to the pilots after the loss of the pitot tubes.

No, I meant where do you have evidence for it ever being a problem.

There was a lot of FUD around fly by wire in the early days of Airbus, none of which ever panned out. So I'm asking you to justify your similar statements.

Here's one article about it. http://www.seattlepi.com/business/boe202.shtml

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