The A320 (introduced in 1988) uses only fly-by-wire. There's been almost 6000 of them built since. The Boeing 777, 787, Airbus A330, A340, A380 and forthcoming

The A320 (introduced in 1988) uses only fly-by-wire. There's been almost 6000 of them built since. The Boeing 777, 787, Airbus A330, A340, A380 and forthcoming A350 are all fly by wire. It's a proven technology which has millions of flight hours behind it. To fly something the size of a modern airliner, you need assistance. Even if they all used traditional control systems you'd still need functioning hydraulics to control the aircraft. That's why we build lots of levels of redundancy into the system. Rather than making something which can gracefully degrade to manual control, we make something which is so failure resistant that it never loses power. virtuz: It seems your account is dead. Not sure why - your comment history doesn't make it obvious. Maybe worth asking HN admins about?