If, hypothetically, an Airbus had a problem in the same region of flight would it even be detected in flight testing? As far as I'm aware it wouldn't be as direct mode is a reversionary mode intended to get the aircraft safely on the ground.
They cannot be greater than a set level (essentially, an average strength pilot), particularly when performing critical manuevers.
This was actually the whole reason MCAS was engineered in the first place: to lower the effective stick force required to within the acceptable limits in certain scenarios.
So presumably Airbus in direct mode could still have similar issues flagged in direct mode, if the plane behaved in such a way as to require unacceptably high stick force to move control elements (even if it was a 1:1 mapping).
One thing I'm not sure about is whether Airbus would have to demonstrate proper controllability (i.e. adherence to control force regulations) in all phases of flight and corner conditions.
You could have a scenario where by they have a complete control reversal on the approach to stall but under normal law the pilot would be oblivious. This would obviously show up in direct law.
I'd hope they would have to demonstrate both things: (1) that a given mode can or cannot be active in a certain scenario, and (2) how the plane behaves in all tested scenarios under all modes potentially active.
Is there a reason this necessarily wouldn't be the case?
But that's not commerical aviation - that's combat aviation. That's "you fly faster or the missile catches you and you die anyway" aviation.
Building intentionally unstable airframes for civilian aviation is a very different proposition. And unrelated to the use of fly-by-wire.
> Airbus jets carry passengers and have been fly-by-wire for decades
a response to
> instability of high performance jets
?
I agree, so where is your comparison of 737 Max and non-Max airframe? Because we have real data, including death toll, that shows one airframe is not like the other.
> Boeing's mistake was in underestimating the burden placed on the pilots in a runaway trim situation, and assuming that pilots could execute a recovery procedure correctly that remained unchanged from prior iterations but that had also been rarely needed on prior iterations (vs. the MAX, where MCAS failures were common enough that an average pilot might actually need to execute the procedure).
This is not the whole truth as we know in this situation MCAS 1.0 was a critical flight system with a non-redundant data source. The "burden" placed on pilots was that the system did not have sufficient and trustworthy information to prevent a faulty and inadequately designed system (MCAS) from crashing the airplane. Furthermore since MCAS is not required, again, on non-Max airframe it seems your assertion that you have background in aerospace engineering is egregious because you should understand all 737 Max are currently grounded because the 737 Max is not a 737 airframe and should be recertified as such.
Nice strawman. We are talking about the MAX not the 737 in general.
Why don't you explain why previous variants of the 737 didn't require MCAS?
The trim equivalent of MCAS would be some elevator trim that ensures the excess AOA potential of the MAX could not occur, if set correctly. That is how a stable aircraft behaves. MCAS is a computer override to compensate for a condition that should not really occur in the first place.
Balloons, paper jets...