On a sorta related note, I also vaguely recall an incident with a domestic airliner in the mid to late eighties, in which systems failed and the pilot had NO control over any control surfaces at all, and managed to fly the thing in somewhere by manipulation of the engines and it resulted in a fairly controlled crash landing that saved many lives. Remember that one?
MM
United Airlines DC-10 flight out of Denver. Lost the hydraulics. Brought it down and landed in Sioux City, maneuvering only by manipulating engine power -- to turn and to lose altitude.
Helluva job of flying...
Now that you mention it, I think I do, but vaguely.
I wonder if the fly-by-wire computers software could be written to handle catastrophic events? I know that some military planes are so twitchy that they'd crash instantly if their control surfaces weren't micromanaged by the computer (i.e., the no-tail stealth planes). Why couldn't civilian airliners software be programmed to handle things like loss of the tail, or a jammed control surface? The pilots could continue to use the flight controls normally, and the software would translate their movements into whatever it took to maintain stable flight. So, if the tail falls off, and the pilots try to steer, the computer would adjust the speeds of each engine as necessary to steer the plane, and so forth.