I am interested to hear what some of you airline pilots think. For those who have flown an airbus- do you like flying it more than a standard jet with a yoke?

 

sidestick..... heard Boeing was going sidestick with the B787 but old school couldn't handle it....

 

My mil-time is all stick. I've flown both Boeing and Bus (A-320).

I prefer Stick or side-stick. The 777 was supposed to be a stick, the UAL Capts who saw the mock-up made them change it, claiming "It will be a cold day in Hell when a United aircraft has a stick!!"

A few months later, they also ordered A-320s.

 

As AF 447 demonstrated there is a big advantage to having a big clunky object right in the middle where everyone can see what it's doing.

But yokes exist to provide leverage to operate mechanical flight controls...in a pure fly-by-wire plane it should make sense to go with the sidestick but it obviously needs some features that airbus is missing.

- Tactile feedback, so one stick follows the other and provides resistance proportional to the amount of input being accepted from the stick in question. This way if two pilots are fighting each other they'll know what's going on.

- Visual indication. I think it would also be a good idea to have a visual indicator of flight control positions on the center panel so a pilot who is hands off can see what the primary flight controls are doing. I guess nobody thought about that when they got rid of the yoke. We have one for the flaps right? Why are they more important than the aileron/rudder/elevator? Not a bus driver and I assume there's an indicator buried in the menus somewhere but that only helps if you already know there's a problem. I think there should an graphic indicator always displayed, maybe one that changes color if the control inputs are unusual for the phase of flight.

 

Have you read the cockpit voice recorder transcripts from Air France 447. You can find them on the internet and Popular Mechanics ran a story on it. Specifically about the part where the right seat pilot was holding back on the stick the entire time and the rest of the crew only realized this problem when it was too late. Having a giant yoke between your legs would have completely avoided this and possibly the entire accident. It was enough reason for me to prefer a yoke.

 

sidesticks don't crash jets....

rather... train the pilot properly.... yoke jets crash too

 

No but lack of SA on what the other guy is DOING with his sidestick apparently does crash jets.

Needs tactile feedback and control position indication.

 

I've flown the A319/320. If you need to see what inputs the other guy is making on the sidestick, you turn your head. It's that easy. Not trying to be a smarty pants. I'm just making a point.

We all learned how much better a yoke is from Colgan 3407.

 

C-17 has a great stick. Does everything you say above and is in the center- not a side stick. From what I understand, it was originally designed as a sidestick but the generals didn't like that.

 

That's easy to say. What about in a critical situation where your stress level is shooting through the roof, the airplane is 30 degrees AOA, it's moving forward at 90kts groundspeed, there's no visible horizon, the instruments don't seem to make sense, and everything seems wrong? I don't think it's excusable that pilots can't understand basic aerodynamics, but if the system is designed so that it is detrimental to figuring out what is going on, it has flaws. Rickair7777 makes some great points, in fact, I think his summation is the best I've seen.