I think only the A300 and the A310 are not fly-by-wire.

Don't forget Boeing's own 777 and 787, both are fly-by-wire also.

Stretching my knowledge about those planes a bit, so it'll probably show, but I think the distinction I'm going for is not how the controls are activated (hydraulic vs electrical), but what role computers play in day-to-day flying. Boeing has long held that pilots are in charge, and as a result Boeing planes are pretty manual without a great deal of automation. Airbus has a differing philosophy, where the computer is fundamentally in control of the plane, and the pilots manipulating the controls are asking the computer to do something for them -- it decides if that request is valid for the flight mode and then acts to make it happen. One of the most well-known relatively recent failures of the Airbus system was the Air France flight, and IIRC a main cause was the computer switching to a mostly manual flight mode (due to a sensor failure) and the resulting change in how the flight controls work confused the copilot to the point that he stalled the plane.

In any case, that's what I was trying to get at. The game Boeing is playing with MCAS is a step in the direction that Airbus has a lot more experience with.

> One of the most well-known relatively recent failures of the Airbus system was the Air France flight, and IIRC a main cause was the computer switching to a mostly manual flight mode (due to a sensor failure) and the resulting change in how the flight controls work confused the copilot to the point that he stalled the plane.

That's a rather misleading take, given by people pushing a certain agenda. The first officer in question was hauling the stick back as far as it would go. This resulted in the plane stalling. That's not a matter of confusing flight modes or computer behaviour - pretty much any aeroplane will stall if you pull the stick back all the way (and what else would you expect to happen?)

> That's not a matter of confusing flight modes or computer behaviour - pretty much any aeroplane will stall if you pull the stick back all the way (and what else would you expect to happen?)

As far as I know, on the normal flight mode (normal law) the computer behavior of an Airbus is that it will not stall if you pull the stick back all the way - it will go as far as it can before stalling, and no more. But that depends on the sensors which had failed, so the computer had to switch to a mode which didn't have that protection.

I think the confusion came from the fact that the captain didn’t get haptic feedback from the joystick that the first officer was pulling it in the opposite direction, plus a lack of communication between the two, or was that a different crash?