Bernard Ziegler

Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson
by William Langewiesche
Published 10 Nov 2009

It was able to do this not because of unfair subsidies, as Boeing has claimed, but because of a culture of intellectual courage that existed in the 1980s within the Euro construct in Toulouse, a bet-the-farm determination to rethink airplanes from scratch and to challenge Boeing in the only way that might succeed—by leaping forward unhindered by tradition and without fear or compromise in the design. The effort was led by a charismatic French test and fighter pilot named Bernard Ziegler, now retired, who must stand as one of the great engineers of our time. Several years earlier, Ziegler had been behind the decision to go with the two-pilot cockpit in the A310, and as a result he was so despised within the French pilots’ union that he received death threats and had to live under police protection for a while.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

Had Robert seen and corrected Bonin’s error early on, the pilots may well have regained control of the A330. The Air France crash, Chesley Sullenberger has said, would have been “much less likely to happen” if the pilots had been flying in a Boeing cockpit with its human-centered controls.32 Even Bernard Ziegler, the brilliant and proud French engineer who served as Airbus’s top designer until his retirement in 1997, recently expressed misgivings about his company’s design philosophy. “Sometimes I wonder if we made an airplane that is too easy to fly,” he said to William Langewiesche, the writer, during an interview in Toulouse, where Airbus has its headquarters.