Farmer Ted
MEMBER
Well I guess we will have to agree to disagree. I’ll stick with the old school. I flew a lot of 30-40 year old aircraft and those old Boeing and Douglas aircraft dispatch reliability was top notch. In fact the old dc9 in its last years at our airline always had the best dispatch reliability in the fleet. They sold all the early Airbus because they were so bad (A300). I fear for these guys when these aircraft get old. When the first 737-300 (our first magic jet)started getting old they sold those right away the gremlins were to hard to fight. You guys know the “why is it doin that?” thing. I can only imagine what an old A320 is like. But hey to each his own. I got a lot of comfort knowing I needed nothing but jetA to keep those old birds in the air. BTW, you couldn’t hack the software on those aircraft because they had none.The bottom line is this. The future is low wing loading, highly aft CG aircraft with limited flight control surfaces. The only way to control these beasts is with fly by wire. We can complain all we want, but the guys who write the checks want highly fuel efficient airplanes. Continuing to "patch" hydro mechanical and mechanical controls is not going to work. It did not work for the Russians with the Mig-29, MD with the MD-11 and the US military had the good sense to move early into FBW to synthesize stability. Boeing's failure with the Max is trying to patch up a dated design with half way measures.
I might also add that Boeing has made a strategic mistake in not developing a modular FBW system. The beauty of Airbus is the same system in the A320 works in the A380. Only the software load is different. Even Gulfstream knows this and took it to heart. Boeing latest version of FBW is not even modular
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