“How come no one mentions an Airbus that has no override for engines that go to idle if a bird takes out the first PT probe?”
I heard this one way back right after it happened, amidst all the other ragging on the automation in the Airbus. Believe me, I’m no fan of the Airbus design philosophy, but this argument is complete BS. I attended a talk given by Jeff Skiles on the accident, and I asked him, face to face, about the condition of the engines. He told me he had a look at the engines after the airplane was pulled from the river. Both engines were completely destroyed. In one, all the compressor blades were simply gone, and the other wasn’t far behind.
Maybe at another time, in another world, the presence of a sensor override would have allowed an engine to keep running, but not in this one.