After seeing how the carbon fiber tails rip off Airbuss's I wouldnt want to fly on it. I'll take Alluminum hulls anyday, its more predictable.
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After seeing how the carbon fiber tails rip off Airbuss's I wouldnt want to fly on it. I'll take Alluminum hulls anyday, its more predictable.
I'm not a big fan of the weak-tailed Airbus either, but aren't the vertical stabilizers of some Boeings made of carbon fibre also? The 777 tail doesn't look like a shiny 727 tail to me. The 777 tail looks like gray painted plastic. Is there some alloy in there I can't see from the Admirals Club? Same with some other AA Boeings.
I'm not too worried about the carbon fibre tube (the basic fuselage). It's the high-stress connection points of wings and engines (and vertical stabilizers and the like with that tube) that makes me hope the Boeing engineers have done their homework.
Towcrazy
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Dose any one know the cost difference between 739 and the 757? <_<
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A friend of many years works in Renton and commented after the Scarebus went down in Jamaica Bay about how Boeing usually has a steel skeleton of some sort under their composite for attach points. He saw the NTSB photos and couldn't believe what he was seeing - no metallic reinforcement. The holes for mounting the fin (6) were not very thick on the bottom (wall thickness appeared to be rather thin also on a new part) and that's where the majority of tension stresses are. That area of failure had already been repaired once by the factory (either on the crashed aircraft or the one the tail was replaced on in TULE) before its delivery and blessed as safe.
That's not to say the Boeing engineers didn't try to save money by not reinforcing in the 787, but I'd like to think they have better sense than to allow junk as produced Airbus to fly around with their name on it.
Glad to see the A300s retire from American - they were an accident waiting to happen.
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<_< ---- Ever hear about any repercussions on the AA Airbus that crashed right after 9-11? I believe the vertical came off that one too!----- AA, and the NTSB, have hushed that one up pretty good! I believe they blamed it on "Pilot error!" As if there was anything a Pilot could do, in the cock pit, to make a vertical seperte from a Aircraft!!! ---- It just shouldn't happen! Then there's the Air France that just went down! The biggest part they found was a portion of the vertical!---- Humm! I wonder!? :unsure:------ Do I see a pattern here? ----- Ever heard the statement:" Too big to fail!?" Well you could modify that and say: "Too many of them out there to ground!"
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The Goose
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That was much more of a political issue than anything else.
The FAA was caught with their hand in Southwest's cookie jar and had to show their toughness.
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*AIRBUS* blamed it on pilot error to get out of the liability. I don't think there was any doubt that AA was of the opinion Airbus had liability for a poor structural design.
BTW, the lugs on the AF A330 that went down supposedly didn't fail in the same fashion as with the two AA tails.
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<_< ------- I didn't think we knew, if, or how, the lugs on the vertical stab of AF 330 failed. The picture of the portion that they recovered that I saw, looked like it was from somewhere above the mount. But that don't really mean anything unless you can see the lugs themselves.-------- Which brings up another question. If AA felt the Airbus was of "poor strucural design", why didn't they get reed of them sooner? :huh:
It was actually a combination of problems that contributed to the crash of AAs A300. The rudder limiter system failed which allowed for max deflection of the rudder left and right. Then, as stated in the other posts on this thread - the attach points at the vertical fin to fuselage were inadequate to handle the loads. I prefer Boeing products myself as well.
Not sure how the A-300 ended up on a 757 economics post...but...to get the facts straight, the rudder limiter did not fail on flt 587 (ship 053). The dispute with Airbus is on the design of the rudder ratio system itself. At the speed the aircraft was going, (about 236 kts), the rudder pedals only deflected 1.5 " to achieve the maximum available rudder throw ( something like 11 degrees). At slower airspeeds, the rudder pedals deflect about 4" to achieve maximum (30 degree) throw. The pilot inputs were smooth and coordinated and in response to a massive wake tubulence encounter from the preceeding JAL 747-400 that weighed around 900,000 lbs. The problem occured when the control inputs were reversed (opposite rudder and aileron) several times in an attempt to control the aircraft. Most pilots assumed that below the designed manuvering speed (Va) (around 250 kts on this airplane), you couldn't damage the aircraft. Wrong. The doubling effect of reversing the rudder inputs put a strain on the tail that is not unlike bending a plastic credit card back and forth until it breaks.
That being said, in my opinion, if this had been a Boeing, the outcome may have been different. Either way, a tough lesson to learn about flight controls in transport category airplanes.
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