With all due respect, I disagree. I'll always advocate a purely mechanical bottom line, because stuff always ends up not working. As complicated as these systems are becoming they are more prone to failure in my opinion. Murphy is a jerk, but his law somehow has persisted and been proven.
Manual reversion is an iffy proposition. For instance: The Brasilia yoke is the size and shape it is because, if they had used a conventional yoke instead of ram's horns, roll control forces would have exceeded the certification limits, and this was on a 26,000lb turboprop with a Vmo of 272 knots (.56 Mach, Mmo). I would rather have a third hydraulic system. (I don't remember enough about the -145 to comment precisely about what my experience in sim with manual reversion was like, but I remember being tired.)
Oh wait, I do (EMB-175), and so do they (le Bus). Everything is fly-by-wire on my airplane except, for inexplicable reasons, the ailerons; the airplane is only sort of capable of overriding a pilot input; and the fly by wire gives us some neat features that makes the airplane REALLY easy to fly.
I'm inclined to agree with
@ATN_Pilot on it. What is left unsaid is that the major handling errors that have happened in Airbus airplanes recently have all happened at an altitude and speed regime where full time use of the autopilot is
required (RVSM). Due to a loss of trim indication the other day, I got to hand-fly the BroBus at 37,000'; even with fly-by-wire, handling up there is not the same as at speeds and altitudes down low. I kept it well within PTS, but it rapidly becomes a boring exercise that really is best relegated to Otto.
I have some empathy for the Air Fronzz 447 crew. They were placed into a situation that they were not adequately prepared for, with confusing/mutually exclusive warnings going off, at night, IMC, in a flight control configuration that is rarely seen outside of the simulator (and maybe not even done at recurrent - and even then probably not done at that altitude and speed), the Captain was in the bunk, and so on. And they had a DOWNRIGHT LOUSY human-computer interface to boot, that masked what one pilot was doing while the other was doing the Right Thing. I feel like the industry failed them just as much as they failed us.
