re: Plane Crash in France - 148 on board

Lots of erroneous information here and being distributed by the media. Not unexpected these days.

The Airbus has a good safety record, especially the A320/19/18 series. There is no problem with the autopilot although I could understand how certain aspects of it could be confusing. The autopilot controls all or nothing. The pilot cannot decide which flight surfaces he or she wants the autopilot to control. Perhaps in the Russian accident the author meant the computer that controls the ailerons was turned off. Big difference.
With that said, the autopilot can be completely disengaged and the Airbus can be flown just like non fly-by-wire aircraft using stick and rudder. (Side stick in Airbus' case!)
In fact, it is recommended by many operators that their flight crews turn off all of the "gee-whiz" stuff on occasion to get a feel for and practice flying the aircraft without automation. At least my company recommends that.

With that said, the Airbus is fly-by-wire and uses 5 different flight control computers which utilize electrical and hydraulic power to move flight surfaces. The only flight control surface with a mechanical linkage to the cockpit is the trimmable horizontal stabilizer(THS). As one would suspect, the computers have many reduncies as do all of the other systems. Total system failures are for the most part unheard of.

We need to give it a few days, maybe weeks or months to see what the investigators find before jumping to conclusions. Again, hard to do in this day of being able to "Google the answer" and get instant gratification, but there's usually a chain of events that occur during plane crashes and it takes careful investigation of the clues to discover the cause.
Oh, and 24 years isn't old for an airplane.
Boeing and Airbus driver