[StavrosK]

And the airplane averaged the inputs from the two sticks, which strikes me as a positively BRAINDEAD design choice. Why would you ever want to average the two inputs when flying a plane? Are you hoping that one pilot pushing and one pulling will somehow, on average, fly the plane correctly?

[JshWright]

The braindead decision (in my uninformed, armchair pilot opinion) was made when the controls were no longer physically linked. Once you have controls that can move independently of each other, none of the options for handling conflicting inputs makes sense to me...

Sum them?

Only take the most extreme of the two inputs (in any given direction)?

Only take the most recently seen input?

Averaging makes more sense than any of those, given the premise of "Control sticks that can move in different directions"

[StavrosK]

You're right, but I'd go with "the secondary control is ignored and clearly marked as such" ("ignored" light turns on or something). But yeah, if they aren't linked, there's not much you can do that will make sense.

[mikeash]

Nah, the right way to compute the final inputs in a case like this is, "This design is stupid and is going to get somebody killed. There is nothing I can do at this level to fix it. You must physically link the two controls."

[damian2000]

When assuming that in the normal case the pilots are never doing the opposite of each other ... the difference between each stick is probably less than 5% or something. Agreed that in this case it seems the worst thing to do.