Airbus Disaster (again)
The Air France crash is the worst scenario imaginable. An aircraft disappearing without warning in the middle of the Atlantic. The chances of finding wreckage are poor, bodies poorer and survivors virtually non-existent. Even finding the black box may prove impossible, leaving the mystery of why the plane disappeared unsolved. Families will mourn their loved ones but closure for them will be hard.
Airbus will be worried. There are now a series of alarming incidences, many of which involve the electronics of the aircraft. It will not be reassuring that the last message from Air France 447 reported electrical faults and cabin depressurisation. Does this point to a design fault in the aircraft itself? The list of problems is worrying:
- 07.10.2008 Qantas A330 suddenly dives for no apparent reason. 70 people injured.
- 29.10.2008 Qantas A330 suffered a navigational radar failure and had to follow an Air New Zealand flight.
- 14.11.2008 Qantas A330 suffered a radar failure and had to return to its departure airport.
- 28.11.2008 Qantas A330 has an oil light come on for one engine
- 28.11.2008 Air New Zealand A320 crashed on a test flight, killing 7. A possible problem with the avionics was mooted.
- 14.12.2008 Air France A321 suffered a double engine stall, landed safely
- 01.06.2009 Air France A330 crashes into Atlantic ocean. Cause unknown but had reported electronic problems.
I don’t know about you, but that is a scary list – and it only includes the recent incidents that I know about. It is particularly worrying that three of these incidents involved A330s falling out of the sky over water for no apparent reason.
I think I shall be thinking twice before boarding an A330 to anywhere.
Additional:
I obviously underestimated the chances of finding the wreckage. The debris from the crash site has already been located. I would like to be as wrong about the chances of survival, but I suspect not. The debris is a streak over 5 km long. That would indicate that the plane simply smacked straight into the sea. My heart goes out to the families of those killed, but at least they now know their loved ones are surely gone. Hopefully they can find the black box and provide some answers as to what happened.
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Jun 2 09 5:17 pm
Do you remember the litany of DC10′s that crashed in the late 70′s and early 80′s? Eventually it was found to be metal fatigue in the tail plane (if my mind serves correctly). I flew across the Atlantic in one at that time and have never been so nervous as then. I watched a wing vibrate the whole way across wondering when it was going to fall off.
There are no DC10′s around now – are Airbus going to the same way?
Jun 2 09 5:30 pm
The recent Air NZ test flight crash killing 7 came down to the usual combination of a series of avoidable errors, that individually could have been survivable and together proved fatal. I wouldn’t fault the Airbus for that one.
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Jun 2 09 5:43 pm
SOrry but three of these were fairly ‘everyday’ failures with no significant consequence not a sign of systemic issues. Radar failed and an oil light came on? Are you serious? I’ve been tarmac bound a number of times due to unexplained oil lights on ANZ domestic Boeing flights. That leads me to suspect they are relatively common.
If you had read the prelim accident report you’d know the Air NZ crash appears to be primarily pilot error.
What about these 2008 incidents – 777 double engine failure at Heathrow, a loss of instrumentation in a Qantas 747 on approach, 747 engine fire which destroyed the plane, 747 double engine failure which crashed on landing, 747 Qantas oxygen cylinder explosion, a 747 engine surge/power loss that led to an abandoned take off and overrun.
Jun 2 09 5:58 pm
I’d agree with insider, you may well find Boeing’s just as bad if you looked hard enough. And it’s probably still safer than travelling by car.
That depends how you calculate it of course. But I wouldn’t rate my chances travelling by car from Rio to Paris…
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Jun 2 09 5:59 pm
The A330 is a twin engine plane used for transcontinental (i.e. transoceanic) flights, and is part of a modern trend towards twin engine aircraft which I think is very risky.
Aircraft engines are extremely reliable, but most crashes come down to design faults and/or human error in the workshop or in the air: the latter can never be entirely stopped. Whatever the aetiology of an engine failure, it’s clear that a well-designed four engine system gives you twice as many options as a two engine system. Also, let’s not forget bird strikes, which usually occur at low altitude where the primary requirement for survival is sufficient power to keep the plane above stalling speed.
Airliner ditchings in the open sea are normally unsurvivable. In the 90′s an airliner ditched in the Indian Ocean and some survived, but that was because it was just off a beach and the area was full of doctors attending a conference. The local hospital was of the tin shack type.
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Jun 3 09 12:59 am
I am happy to accept that minor failures happen on aircraft all the time (the ones in the list above were all reported on Stuff). I also accept that this extends to Boeings as well. What continues to concern me is that the A330 has been involved in three serious “fall out of the sky” events.
The Qantas episode was conveniently blamed on a computer “glitch” despite a similar incident happening in 2007 on a test flight for Air Mauritius. (i.e. why was it not fixed?). The actual report on the Air New Zealand crash provides no explanation of the crash and does not lay blame on pilot error. I have heard the explanation that Zen is talking about, but it sounds hollow. It assumes that an experienced pilot with over 7,000 hours on an A320 put his plane into a stall at low altitude, leaving himself no maneuver room. Dubious explanation, to say the least.
Airbus has a great safety record up until these accidents. But then, as mawm points out, so did the DC-10 before the tail started falling off.
Jun 3 09 2:50 am
Hmm. A 4 engine plane typically only flies on 2 engines min – it won’t fly on one. A 2 engine plane will fly on 1 engine. I seem to recall that the math isn’t as intuitive as it seems. Since you have 4 engines you are more likely to have one fail than if you only have two. And something about the combinations….
As for the Airbus incidents. I seem to recall that 2 of the Qantas ones were being blamed on a naval base they were flying over at the time – one that broadcasts very high power low frequency transmissions to submerged submarines (for the US navy among others).
I was once told that a 747 can stay in the air on one engine. I have no idea if it is true. It may be that the 747 needs at least two engines for take-off.
Jun 3 09 8:58 am
A few comments regarding the DC-10:
a.) I can’t think of any instances offhand of the tail falling off. Perhaps you’re thinking of the American Airlines DC-10 that crashed at Chicago in 1979 after an engine fell off? The airline took most of the blame for that, as maintenance staff took a shortcut that had not been approved by the manufacturer.
b.) An airliner’s wings are meant to flex a bit in flight. Nothing to fear about that.
c.) The main reason why there are no longer many DC-10s flying: they went out of production 20 years ago after a run of 18 years or so. Old planes are like old cars and old TVs: unreliable, expensive to repair, and technologically obsolete.
Jun 3 09 9:41 am
Perhaps the Airbus has an inherent design flaw. While I may be wrong, I’ve heard that on an Airbus computers fly the plane (assisted by the pilots), whereas on a Boeing pilots fly the plane (assisted by computers). If massive lightning strikes completely disabled the electronics and computer systems on the Air France flight then the plane would be beyond control.
As one of my pilot friends says: “If it’s not a Boeing, I’m not going.”
If it’s not a Boeing, I’m not going – I like it.
Jun 3 09 10:26 am
Perhaps there is a difference, the 777 problem has been identified and a fix proposed (abnormal cold during the flight led to fuel “slushing” and consequent fuel starvation), the 747 engine issues are also reasonably well understood and caused mostly by known maintenance issues. The A330 problems on the contrary are dismissed by Airbus (and the commentators here) as non-systematic and not related to the aircraft. That may be true, but a bit premature no ? Frankly three incidents suggest to me that in certain rare circumstances the A330 controls do not respond appropriately.
One major difference between Being and Airbus systems even on their most modern aircraft, is that Boeing has a last resort manual mode. If, and it is extremely unlikely but can happen, your on-board flight computers cease to work properly, on an Airbus you are simply screwed, there is no way to control the aircraft. On a Boeing, whether or not it will do any good is questionable, but you can switch to direct manual controls. There is legitimate argument over the pros and cons of both approaches, but there are surely circumstances where the Boeing approach is safer. Equally, manual mode may encourage pilots to switch over when it would have been better not to. The Airbus ditching into the Hudson for example was possibly unachievable without the fine computerized controls.
Or a fine, uncomputerised pilot.
Jun 3 09 11:04 am
The way I have heard it described is that the electronics will make the airbus survive far more than the Boeing. Or the Boeing will get into trouble much sooner in comparable situations.
Re the AirNZ crash, from memory the pilots performed a stall manoeuvre at too low a height and the result was unrecoverable. They should not have done it according to normal flying guidelines.
This was the conclusion of the French interim report. It still asks us to believe that an experienced pilot with over 12,000 hours (7,000+ flying A330s) would make such a dumb, elementary mistake.
Jun 3 09 3:55 pm
Insider, that’s the Airbus story, and they promote it hard. Practically, I don’t think it’s proven at all. MD, I did say “possibly unachievable”, we’ll never know.
However in this case, if the A330 lost cabin pressurization, that sounds a lot like a possible loss of structural integrity rather than a purely electronics or systems fault. If they’ve found some fuel signs and minor wreckage around 400km out from the coast of France, it may be tricky to recover enough evidence to know what did happen. Perhaps the flight recorders can be retrieved, they should certainly show if it was systems failure.
Jun 4 09 2:49 am
There is another factor that may have some affect on this crash. The aircraft certifier in many cases will put Special Conditions in the Certification Requirements. For the A330 Special Condition Number 5 Interaction of System and Structures allows the Factor of Safety of 1.5 (FAR 25.303) to be reduced to 1.0 under certain conditions because the Control System can give Gust Alleviation thereby reducing the loads on the structure. Possibly the rough weather affected the Control System and the Structure did not have this protection thereby being only good for Limit Load, 67% of Ultimate strength.
Jun 7 09 3:09 am
Just setting the record straight on the DC-10.
No tails fell off as far as I’m aware, unless one slipped past the keeper.
But it did have a design problem that led to two crashes before it was fixed … one in the US I believe; the best known being the Turkish Airlines crash over France.
Those two crashes were the result of a cargo door problem. When it wasn’t properly closed, the door blew off and ripped away some hydraulic controls as it went, thus rendering the aircraft uncontrollable.
A similar thing occurred on the DC-10 that crashed at O’Hare in the early 80s (1980??) but involving failure on another part of the aircraft. In that case, maintenence workers had been taking some shortcuts with one of the pins that attaches the engine and pylon to the wing which I think led to a crack forming. They were bolting the pylon and the engine on together, as a single unit, if I remember rightly, when each component should have been attached separately – pylon first, then engine.
It resulted in an engine tearing off on take-off. That in itself might not have been catastrophic as it possibly could have climbed out on the two remaining, but again, as the engine and pylon departed the aircraft it severed hydraulic controls. In that case, the jet rolled, couldn’t be righted and became uncontrollable.
Like the other poster, I, too, made a number of flights on DC-10s in that era, including two trans-Atlantic and two trans-pacific – including one that went from LA via Auckland to Sydney, requiring an extra take-off and landing. If I wasn’t completely terrified the whole time, it was only because I was young and stupid.
(They were probably a lot less risky, though, than the four Aeroflot flights I made in 1983, including two internal ones in the Soviet Union … one of which had loose wires hanging out of a fusebox in the \coat-room\ at the rear of the aircraft).
I do agree, however, that Airbus might need to check some of these goings on … just on the off-chance.
But since no one knows what happened to the Air France jet, it’s possibly too early to be coming up with anything in regard to what happened, as it’s speculation at best.
In the meantime, Airbus should collate all the information it has on anything that even smells like the Qantas mishap (which could have been worse than it was had the crew become disoriented and overwhelmed by events beyond the initial malfunction, as has happened elsewhere in the past) and look closely at it.
Neverthless, Airbus jets make a zillion flights a year and have been doing so for a long, so perhaps it’s not quite time to panic yet. The A330′s safety record is still holding up pretty well.
Jun 7 09 3:57 am
Update on that previous post: the cargo door caused one fatal crash and another incident in the US in which the crew were able to land safely. The other US crash in 1989 involved a piece of fan blade breaking away and tearing up the rear engine in flight and severing vital hydraulics (again). The crew tried to fly it with the throttles by varying the thrust, and almost made it home safely. The aircraft crashed on landing. However, they saved a lot of lives: Of nearly 300 on the flight, 185 survived.
Bizarre as it sounds, the DC-10, once its problems had been fixed, became regarded by its crews as a safe and reliable aircraft – and it actually has a decent safety record comparable to other aircarft of its era. Sadly, though, as too often happens in aviation, the constant inspections and safety modifications that made it safe came at a cost in human lives.
Jun 9 09 11:24 am
As a professionally qualified electronics engineer I am only too well aware of the problems that can arise in any system that relies on software, sensors and actuators as a complex control system. I sometimes wish I was in a different profession as I just do not have total faith in the Airbus ‘fly by wire’ system. To put it another way, would you completely trust an aircraft flown by Microsoft after the number of bugs that pop up in computers? That is ignoring the complexities of data connections, potential corrosion problems and risk of EMP damage. The less you know, the safer you must feel. I sometimes wish I was non-technical as if you fly you have to accept that some will go down. It’s still safer than driving according to statistics but I feel safer when I am in control!
Jun 17 09 11:45 pm
The first Airbus going into the trees on an airshow debut was blamed on pilot error. The black box was missing 4 seconds of tampered tape – the pilots Jailed and funny enough the flight manual amended immediately.
The preminary Air New Zealand Handover flight on low speed stall at low altitude by an experienced pilot “nothing to do with dodgy sensors or anything” blamed on pilot error (Germany has amongst the most stringent pilot training in the world)withh thousands of hours.
The 330 over the Alantic with the tailplane found miles away from other wreckage???. Look at the history of Airbus tail sections saying bye bye. Too stiff composits attached to flexing metal expanding and contracting with tempeture and cabin pressurisation. Just opinion but I do not trust the French “investigations” at all as they have a huge investment in Airbus aircraft and as history goes will do anything to protect this. Opinion only but????????????????????
Yes, I confess to feeling uneasy about the French investigating something in which they have such a vested interest…