"It was unflyable -- literally -- without a digital flight computer on board, which made corrections to the flight path 40 times a second," said Christian Gelzer, chief historian at the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in southern California (where the plane was tested) in a phone interview.
"The engineers concluded that if all three flight computers had failed together, the airplane would have broken up around the pilot before the pilot had a chance to eject."
There's a neat article on NASA's old Grumman X-29 forward-swept wing research aircraft over at CNN. Lotsa great photos, too.
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