Originally Posted by
sailingfun
I also omitted the Qantas A330 that was saved only buy superb crew action but still resulted in a large number of critical injuries. There was also the Lufthansa test flight that crashed killing the crew after 2 AOA vanes malfunctioned.
MCAS was designed to make the MAX handle like the NG in one particular corner of the flight envelope never normally approached in airline operations. There is nothing inheritantly wrong with the airframe and the fix will take care of the malfunction. If you feel as you appear to by your post I would avoid the A330-900 since it has a similar problem corrected by software. Both designs moved the engines forward and up for ground clearance.
The QF32 story is a good TEM study for anyone, but especially Airbus pilots.
I didn't pay attention to it because it was an A380 and I fly the 320, but a lot of what happened had similarities and we should all pay attention to what they did.
First the incident was caused by a misaligned boring of a stub pipe in the #2 RR Trent engine on the airplane. It was a QC issue not a design issue.
Not long after takeoff the engine exploded with 500 shrapnel hits on the jet, 650 wires cut, I believe every system compromised and several tires blown in the well.
They had 100 ECAMs to run and no way to talk to Qantas.
And all of these ECAMS were sent to Qantas fwiw. They're sitting in their OCC equivalent looking at all of these ECAMs going what in the hell is going on here? And then they start seeing news reports of a downed Qantas jet and they put two and two together but knew the jet was still flying.
So remember this when you're like "I'm not calling ATL Radio..." They're getting all the ECAMs and data, let the Airbus experts down there in MCC help.
But it flew on for 3 hours with the Captain on occasion stopping and asking the crew "should we just put her in the water now?" Not to be the next Swiss Air, but the crew thought they could do it.
They were leaking massive amounts of fuel by the way and only 3 of 11 fuel tanks were even working and one had a souvenir.
Fascinating stuff.
5 pilots by the way. 1 Captian, 1 FO, 1 FO/SO... and 2 LCA. And they butted heads at the outset over where the LCA would sit. Like whoa.
And when they landed, it was only after they massaged the numbers and finally got a number that made landing a possibility. As they slowed the airplane it started to buffet. Turns out the ailerons were failed and slipstreaming. So they found they couldn't get slower.
A320 Podcast
But it wasn't a bad design by Airbus. RR ate that one. Cost well over $100M to put the airplane back together and RR wrote a big check over it.