Airbus fly-by-wire architect Bernard Ziegler honoured
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Bernard Ziegler, with the largest FBW airliner. Photo by Airbus
No-one has more influenced contemporary aircraft design than Bernard Ziegler, who drove the program to develop the fly-by-wire FBW cockpit and control systems first applied in a civil airliner to the Airbus A320 in 1987, and who received the Flightglobal Lifetime Achievement Award during the Farnborough Air Show overnight.
Ziegler, 79, is the son of one of the founding fathers of Airbus, Henri Ziegler, who became its first president. He flew as an Airbus Industrie test pilot on the A300, and A310 airliners, which preceded FBW, and was the first flight test pilot on the A320 when it began its certification flying in 1987, and also flew on subsequent Airbus FBW developments in his career as senior vice president engineering until his retirement in 1997.
At the Le Bourget Air Show in 1973 the writer was one of many who flew in the open cockpit A300 prototype captained by Bernard Ziegler, standing behind the pilots using a monkey grip bar while being given a running commentary on its characteristics, and the occasional thrill, in what was a very different environment to that of air shows today, back when reporters had ready access to the leading figures in aviation and their remarkable flying machines.
Ziegler in the LH seat in the A300 prototype, landing at Le Bourget 1973, photo Ben Sandilands
In an earlier report, there is even a blurry photo of the back of Ziegler’s head (above) as we cross the runway end at Le Bourget, as shown by the lights on what was a typically very rainy air show day. The A300 handled the contaminated runway really well, which is why the media didn’t end up falling forward into the action which on this occasion, included US Senator and Presidential hopeful Barry Goldwater as the guest co-pilot.
Goldwater gave this reporter and an ABC TV crew a very entertaining interview, shot on 16 mm film, then synched for sound in a four hour exercise in purgatory for reporters of those times off a quarter inch magnetic tape, and then sent by air freight to Rippon Lea in Melbourne to go to air about three days later.
So much for spontaneity in electronic media, since satellites cost up to $US 70,000 for a few minutes, and there weren’t many of them, and they had to be booked days in advance.
The thrill of joy flights in an A300 were forgotten shortly afterwards, when the pride of the USSR, the supersonic TU-144, crashed during a showing off competition with a Concorde prototype.
It is good to see Ziegler looking so well, under the wing of an A380, which when he retired, remained in the project phase as the A3XX.
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The A300 was certainly a revolutionary aircraft for its time, with a multitude of firsts which doomed competing tri-jets and inflight engineers.
The A320 was also revolutionary, due to Ziegler’s fly-by-wire technology. Some people blamed fly-by-wire for the first crash of an A320 in 1988 (Google “A320 Mulhouse” to see video of it).
Twenty four years later, some people are again blaming Airbus fly-by-wire for the first in-service crash of an A330 (Air France 447).
But I guess the overall Airbus crash statistics are no worse than for their Boeing equivalents. The fly-by-wire Boeing 777 hasn’t suffered a major loss of life, but only by the skin of its teeth, after the total power loss on BA flight 38, which crashed onto the grass at Heathrow in 2008.
So, despite those incidents, fly-by-wire aircraft have suffered less crashes than previous generation aircraft.
I have a recollection of an article in Paris Match on the Mulhouse crash in which the reporter had access to the CVR transcript and quoted the captain of that jet as saying “This will give Ziegler a hard on” as it flew low and slow past the spectators, only to fly into the canopy of the young forestry plantation that was immediately ahead of it, and much closer than the crew had realised until it was too late.
The pilot concerned did jail time, not for bad language, but manslaughter. The three fatalities included at least one handicapped child in a wheelchair, who had been selected for the joy flight, which was, according to reports, going to climb away from the airshow being held at Habsheim-Mulhouse and cruise past the summit of Mont Blanc.
Ben – I understand the issue to be that Boeing’s fly-by-wire system provides feedback to the pilots through the control systems (wheel, throttle, etc) while the Airbus system does not. If it did, the AF447 co-pilot might have noticed the command pilot pulling back on the stick and may have been able to correct this.
Also, Airbus FBW does not allow pilots to push the aircraft outside normal flight performance limits, but Boeing’s system does.
Can you comment?
Tamas,
AF447 was taken so far outside normal performance limits that none of the pilots nor at times, the machine knew where it was, what state it was in, and what could be done in which sequence.
Opinions differ in pilot ranks, and I’m not a pilot, only a person who asks pilots to try to explain things in lay terms, but I tend to side with the view that the jet was rendered unrecoverable very early in the sequence of events by a crew that didn’t know where they had gone, nor how to come back.
I query the control stick comment only to the extent that the PNF notes that the plane is still climbing early in the sequence, as shown on the CVR, so if we assume that he knows that he may have been aware of the relationship between controller input and a climb, especially in relation to the TOGA response the inquiry points to at the hands of the PF.
To me, this is ample warning that what many have seen as a simple glaring fault in the management of the flight is somewhat more complex. This has also informed the recommendations that images of cockpit displays be recorded by future flight data recorder devices since it is this area of doubt that the authors keep coming back to at various stages. One of the challenges I had, and others have also had, in reading the report, is separating the assumptions in the narrative in the report from what the authors of the report actually knew, and if you go through it paragraph by paragraph, you may become increasingly baffled by this imprecise blending of the assumed and the proven, even though I think the authors made a determined effort to come to be best comprehension of what happened as was to them possible.
As to the Airbus system v the Boeing system, it is very difficult to arrive at a valid copmparison of hull losses and fatalities. On the face of it comparing Airbuses and Boeings built after the years in which comparable Airbuses came into use, the Airbuses show fewer crashes.
But we can’t normalise the comparison any way I know how to account for in a wider exposure by Boeings to a range of airlines of differing flight safety standards, or different operating environments so such a conclusion based on raw figures could be unfair to Boeing.
Very interesting Ben – thanks.
Tamas Calderwood,
I see these two questions that you post spring up in close formation on
various sites with minimal changes in wording by completely unconnected persons.
Is there a cheatsheet around for this?
I would assume that people read around, see answers posted and then realise
that these exact same questions have been answered over and over gain.
( except the poster has an agenda and/or a job to do
Uwe – um, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I just read Ben’s post and asked him the questions.
Tamas , you seem to have got your information from Wikipedia. the answer would seem to be that any FBW aircraft will hand over to the pilots complete control if there is no airspeed data or AOA information to process. This is what happened in in AF447.
But its not like a motor vehicle. I cant turn off traction control in my Honda Accord, but a very few high performance cars do have that option.
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