Anyway, apologies for dragging this off topic, just get tired of people bringing up AF447 as if it's clearly the fault of Airbus; even with the most generous interpretation, the airplane plays a minor part in this accident.
It's not clearly the fault of Airbus, I just don't hold that "Airbus = awesome". The whole concept of preventing the pilot from making improper control inputs and applying flying skill right up until the moment those skills are necessary is, in my opinion, a mistake, and one I believe contributed to that incident, among others. AF296, perhaps - yes, pilot error, compounded by "the computer will protect us" (the whole point of the demonstration) and "oh crap, the computer won't let me pull up".
Fair enough. Planes still crash occasionally, so none of them are awesome yet
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Pilots definitely need experience hand flying regardless of airframe, but outside of the sim they're not going to and shouldn't have much experience flying on the edge of the envelope or in multiple failure scenarios. A 737 pilot is going to have no more experience riding the stick shaker than an A320 pilot will in alternate or direct law, but both pilots need to know what to do if they end up in those situations. Aside from the 737 and 767, Boeing has at least caught up on their control systems, so I don't think there is much between them on their modern designs (which does not include 737MAX). I think the next major Airbus design will probably have force feedback on the sticks that will at least be used to more clearly communicate DUAL INPUT, but they will probably still rely on the priority switch to deal with that, rather than having pilots fight each other.
AF296 was so irresponsible that I'd call it criminally negligent (and the courts agreed); the Captain's overconfidence is on him, not the plane. Alpha prot and alpha floor are protections, they shouldn't be something you intentionally include in your flight plan, and double especially not when already very low and slow with the engines at idle and with one of those protections disabled. If you wouldn't hand-fly it without any protections at all, you shouldn't fly it. The protections in that incident worked exactly as designed, and protected against the stall he was trying to initiate; the reason they crashed wasn't because he couldn't pull up, it was because he made the call too late for the idle engines to provide enough thrust to climb out with the dangerous low energy state he'd put the aircraft in. The only alternative would have been it letting him stall it, and who knows how that would have turned out. It doesn't matter what type of aircraft you're flying, or whether it prevents you from stalling it or not, low and slow is a dangerous regime.
I do very much prefer the Boeing cockpit layout. Although I am not a pilot myself, mechanically coupling the controls on both seats is one of those things that just seems like an obviously good idea. I also think a yoke is a much more logical input device for something like an airliner than a stick, but again I'm not a pilot so I have not experienced either one outside of PC simulators.
Counterpoint: yokes get in the way of other controls, displays, charts, etc, are more cumbersome to operate one-handed, so they are noticeably less ergonomic, and both sides could be jammed simultaneously by an incapacitated pilot, in which case your only recourse is to un-jam them.
There's a more fundamental difference though, which I think is usually more what people are referring to when they compare the two. The Boeing design (ex. 787) has the controls coupled approximately to the deflection of the control surfaces as in a classical airplane. Want to execute a turn? Hold the yoke over to maintain the desired bank angle, pull back slightly to counter the loss of lift, and return it to centre when you want to roll out. In the Airbus design, the sidestick is instead (roughly speaking) coupled to roll/pitch
rate, and the flight computer determines the deflection to achieve it, so you just roll the plane over to the desired bank angle, then release the side stick and the plane will maintain that bank angle and your previous pitch until you roll it back the other way. Likewise to climb you pull back to the desired attitude and then release until you want to level out when you push the nose forward. But even Boeing is getting on board with this as 787 has a similar rate-based model as Airbus, despite still having yokes.
The Boeing protections also work differently in a way that maybe depends a bit on the yoke itself, as the flight control system doesn't simply stop you if you try to command something unreasonable, it will fight you with strong force feedback, but you can override it all the way into stall, overbank, or I think overspeed if you push hard enough. Their philosophy is to inform about the envelope, but not to limit the inputs of the pilots even if they're about to violate it.
Which is better? Both have proponents, it seems to mostly come down to preference. I'm not an airline pilot either, but I can see how the rate-based design could reduce workload slightly during manual flight as you only need to provide input to change attitude, not to maintain it (even when faced with changing speed or wind), and it definitely makes it easier to take notes, deal with paper charts, and eat without a yoke in your lap. Those that prefer the more direct model see the fact that in certain multiple failure scenarios the Airbus controls may degrade to be more direct, and pilots are likely inexperienced with flying that way as a significant risk. Or that in some extremely unlikely scenarios it's possible the computers may be wrong and prevent you from doing something you need to do, and there is no way to override them on Airbus. And as we've discussed here, the lack of coupling between sticks, though force feedback to communicate this is available now in some sidestick aircraft (none from Airbus, AFAIK). I don't think the choice of yoke vs. sidestick itself has much in it, it's just a familiarity thing.