Greg Farris writes:

Well - we are getting much closer to a defensible response here.
We can accept then that the plane crashed because the pilot flew too low and
advanced the throttles too late. Contributing factors include the pilot's
incomplete comprehension of the aircraft's systems. What the investigation had
to determine then, was whether the pilot's poor comprehension was due to poor
application of his training, or whether the training itself was inadequate.

There's another possibility: The designers of the FBW system had no
clue as to how real pilots react in different situations, and failed
to anticipate what a pilot would do and expect in those situations.
If they had done their job correctly, the FBW would do exactly what a
pilot would expect it to do, and there would be no "modes" for a pilot
to memorize over and above everything else that he already has to
know. Flying isn't a video game, even if some desk-bound geeks at
Airbus might like to pretend that it is.

If a pilot, faced with an unexpected situation does something other than what
his training suggests, and the result is positive, then nothing is said. But if
the pilot does not act in accordance with his training and the result is
negative, then it is fair play to attribute it to pilot error.

What happens if the aircraft is designed to do something
counterintuitive, such as having the movements of the yoke reversed,
and the pilot forgets this (or is never trained about it) and makes a
mistake that leads to an accident? Is it the pilot's fault because
the aircraft behaved like no other that he has ever flown, or the
manufacturer's fault because it designed in features that were in
direct contradiction of a pilot's normal base training?

But then, all of the above is moot when one considers, as resident experts have
explained to us, that Airbus aircraft are not controllable through pilot input
...

They are not controllable outside an envelope that is enforced by the
computers. In this case, you have to wonder just exactly why pilots
are needed at all. If all flying situations are covered by the
computers, the computers can fly the aircraft from start to finish,
and you can dispense with pilots.

This will probably actually happen one day for commercial airliners,
although that day is still quite far away. Pilots of airliners are
increasingly just skilled attendants, not people who actually fly the
plane.

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