Call me paranoid, but I have no trust in fly-by-wire technology. I'd feel a lot safer if the pilots had a mechanical connection to the control surfaces.
Maybe I'd be more trusting if I wasn't a software developer. The idea of a subtle bug, or a tiny bit of oxide dirtying a contact to a memory card, or some similar "minor" glitch standing between the pilot and the wings just gives me the shivers.
The advantage of fly-by-wire is that you can fly that thing from the control tower -- theoretically. Nice defense from hijackings.
They do. The rudder and horizontal stabilizer still maintain the old "conventional" rigging in addition to fly-by-wire. In full manual reversion, with all computers lost, it is still possible to fly the aircraft to a safe landing.
There is a heck of a lot of redundancy in the FBW system on the Airbus. No single computer controls any flight control surface, and the redundant computers use different processors running different software to prevent a single glitch from disabling the entire FBW system.
The computers are far from being bleeding edge tech. For instance, the Flight Management and Guidance computers use 8088 processors - old, slow, but well-tested technology. FBW software is about as debugged and reliable as you can get. Not perfect, nothing ever is... but dang close.
The fly-by-wire method doesn't really make provisions for the passengers.
I can definitely feel the difference...the Airbus models bank hard. It takes me two days to recover from a flight on that type of plane.