Thank you, relangford and laxsnaogg, for restarting the discussion. Frankly, I was wondering if anybody else cared about the loss of control issue and so i was not sure if flyer talk was even the right forum to discuss. Great!
Trained as both a software- and a mechanical engineer, I've had an early interest in aviation and human machine interfaces since growing up in Germany where my first boss was involved in the development of the A300. Interestingly, there was already controversy around cockpit design and automation back then as we had two related accidents in Europe (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Inter_Flight_148) and in both these cases it looked like various aspects of automation and human/machine interface was to blame. At the Berlin air show in 1994 I met the president of the German "Cockpit" air pilot association, who mentioned that many of her colleagues had concerns about the man machine interface Airbus was developing. She mentioned issues like thrust lever positions not being intuitive (they don't move with the auto throttle control), side sticks (in older planes the control column responds to what the autopilot does, where as the airbus joy stick stays motionless), and she felt that important flight parameters were displayed by airbus as small numbers that would be hard to read in high-stress situations. The cockpit design was not giving her as much 'feel' as as it could as to how the plane is acting and responding and, in a upset situation where you have high stress and little time, she felt this could be a problem. Many years later, the Air France 447 accident brought back memories from the conversation with her when the A332 autopilot disconnected suddenly in a storm at night leaving the pilots utterly baffled how to respond and unable to fly manually. See,
http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-ne...pitch-commands.
Some think that only radical training improvements might be able to improve the situation.
The issue is not a side-stick vs. yoke issue. It's a situational awareness issue and knowing how to react in said situations. The Airbus side-stick has an overriding capability for the other pilot to take control from the other one. If both pilots were making side-stick inputs, like in the case of AF447, the airplane actually yells at you "dual input!" "dual input!" That's usually the first clue that you know the other pilot is also making side-stick inputs. I suspect that due to the gravity of the situation, the AF447 pilots did not hear the "dual input!" commands. One only has to look at the accident of the Asiana 777 in SFO, which was another case of lack of situational awareness. Some of the key tenants of flying these days is knowing what the automation is doing and knowing when to take control when you don't like what the automation is doing. A yoke or side-stick isn't going to fix those issues.
Totally agree that situational awareness is part of the issue. But what the other pilot is doing in response to a developing situation is an important part of situational awareness. Some argue very persuasively that the side-stick design makes this very difficult. In this short video, Sully Sullenberger demonstrates the issue (see here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kERSSRJant0.) The other two pilots "not flying" in the AF447 accident did not realize that Bonin, the "pilot flying" had the stick back and was pointing the nose upwards for extended periods when flying at a high cruise altitude where this was very dangerous. They could not see Bonin's stick and "dual input" alarm did not help the others, because they did not understand the situation and so they did not try to intervene until much later into the situation.