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World's Largest Passenger Plane May Be Unsafe, Some Say
CNET reports (citing this BBC video account) that some aircraft engineers in Australia are concerned about small cracks that have appeared on the wing ribs of some Airbus A380 airplanes, a report says. They're calling for the whole fleet to be grounded, but Airbus says the cracks are harmless.
Airbus have issued an inspection notice saying it's a materials issue, and that airlines should inspect at an aircrafts 4 year inspection interval. They would not do so, and would be overruled by the European safety body EASA, if they thought otherwise.
This has been discussed to death on aviation industry forums, and the general consensus is it's a non-issue - the calls for grounding are being headed by an industry union, not a regulatory body.
Every aircraft has cracks in it, even brand new ones - in this case, it's in a non-critical location and is non-load bearing. A check at the 4 year point is adequate for this type of discovery.
I'm an experienced aircraft mechanic and have no problem with it.
"Such parts wouldn't be there in the first place, now would they?"
"Fairing" comes to mind. which exists to cover structure and streamline flow.
Even delicate fighters can have considerable defects and be safe to fly. One inspects, documents, and monitors those with inputs from engineers and tech reps.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Actually, it isn't that it lost a lot of fuel before takeoff (although it did leak a bit), it's the fact that it couldn't takeoff at all with a full fuel load. The engines and airframe were optimized for high-speed, high-altitude flight. Lift and thrust characteristics were terrible in the low-altitude subsonic speed regime.
A radiation therapy machine called Therac-25 had severe design flaws that caused it to kill several people. The AECL engineers and managers were overconfident and over-greedy, respectively, so even after a significant number of accidents they refused to admit that the machine was faulty.
Chances are the problem is quite serious, but Airbus' actuaries tell them that the short-run cost of performing immediate repairs is greater than the long-run cost of their insurance rates after a mechanical failure.
pilot error as in hiding a bug in airbus autopilot or it reading faulty gauges.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/27/air-france-flight-447-crash-report-airbus-autopilot-to-blame.html
What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 tells the story as it stands after investigations. It's a rather chilling read. But it makes one thing clear: it was about human error. The plane was even fully operational when it crashed, as an anti-icing system had managed to bring air speed sensors back to operation before it.
Two years after the Airbus 330 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, Air France 447's flight-data recorders finally turned up. The revelations from the pilot transcript paint a surprising picture of chaos in the cockpit, and confusion between the pilots that led to the crash.
The people who lie are usually the ones with the most to gain/lose. What do service engineers have to gain by grounding the fleet - not much. What would Airbus lose by having their brand new fleet grounded - a huge amount of public confidence.
What do service engineers have to gain?
Well, let's have a bit of context. These aren't just "service engineers", it's the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association, the trade union for aircraft engineers in Australia.
The same trade union which wants an A380 maintenance hangar in Australia, written into the workplace agreement they were negotiating with Qantas.
They've recently settled that agreement, without getting the hangar, (one source), so one presumes they're just keeping their name in the news.
The crew is trained for IAS failure. They're supposed to use a chart to manually set throttle position and nose attitude. This crew, for some reason, failed to follow the procedures.