Here to there wrote:

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 18:51:45 GMT, Pete wrote:

But Molin didn't know he was putting more pressure on the tail than
it could bear. Why he didn't -- and who's to blame for that -- is the
subject of a bitter fight between Airbus and American.

I thought that was one of the main advantages of fly-by-wire systems,
to eliminate truly stupid actions of pilots. Sounds like Airbus shares
a lot of blame for the crash. It's like an auto maker made a car that
sheared off its wheels if the steering wheel was turned too quickly,
and the maker's response was to tell drivers, "Don't do that!"


Ummmmmm... so what exactly do you think will happen to a car if you
turn the wheel rapidly while driving at more than a snail's pace?

If it exceeds the available traction of the tires then I expect the
car to start sliding and possibly spin out. As long as the car
doesn't hit anything then I expect loss of tire rubber to be the
most serious damage. Of course if there is an impact (even with
something like a curb), then there are likely to be much more
severe consequences.

I'll
give you a hint - you'll get the opportunity to find out either how
expensive it is to replace your suspension, CV joints, etc, or how
well your roof supports the weight of the car after it has flipped.
Probably you'll discover all of those.

BMW had a sales promotion event recently where they had us
try out some of their cars on a large parking lot with a
course laid out with cones. They actively encouraged aggressive
driving and there were frequent incidents where control was lost
resulting in the cars sliding and spinning. As far as I know there
was no serious damage done to any of the vehicles other than loss
of tire rubber (tires were replaced every 2-3 hours during the
event).

"Don't do that" is a perfectly reasonable approach. You can't
make everything infinitely strong.

But if there's a clear rule for what 'shouldn't be done' then it
would seem prudent to build it into the firmware for the fly-by-wire
system so that it can't be done.

From what I've read,
it wasn't the first officer's fault, really - he did exactly
what he was trained to do. Unfortunately, his training was
wrong.