Airbus is a bus with wings

[Hosakawa Tito]

I believe it's bad luck on the flying public's side. Circumventing and skimping on maintenance procedures is playing russion roulette with your customers, eventually it's gonna go bang instead of click. All Yemen Airways planes should be boycotted from major airports till they clean up their act.

[Aemilius Paulus]

All Yemen Airways planes should be boycotted from major airports till they clean up their act.

I am certain you know yourself how unrealistic it is. But yes, not a bad idea. But then you would also have to ban the Russian Airlines. Russian Roulette is a Russian thing, and our Russian Aeroplanes offer the ultimate Roulette experience! Well, it does depend on the airline, but the AeroFlot, the largest Airline Company in the World in terms of routes and planes pays for the quantity with quality. Typical Russian behaviour. Quite efficient in the economic and practical sense, but go tell that to the victims of the crashes...

[Productivity]

Interesting article...

The crash of a Yemenia Airbus A310 on its second attempt to land at the Moroni airport on Comoro Island yesterday had all the classic early jet age prerequisites for an air disaster.

It was a crappy airline flying an old jet in the middle of the night in bad weather into a strip with a short runway where the approaches are impinged upon by big hills.

The flight sounds like a re-run of any of too many 60s British charter holiday catastrophes involving killer carriers like Dan-Air, which became gruesomely infamous for its clean-up processes involving large common graves, bags of quick lime and platitudes in the cut-throat budget package market it dominated, despite its record, in those times.

The jet is reported as having abandoned an attempt to land in bad weather and crashed into the sea on its second approach. Of the 153 people on board only one passenger, a 14-year-old girl, has been found alive in the sea surrounded by bodies and debris.

The EU has been running a name and shame campaign against these sorts of carriers which hang on to the fringes of the travel market.

The Yemeni national airline jet in question had been banned from EU airspace for maintenance irregularities and the airline itself was on notice to lift its game or have its entire operations prohibited within Europe, and put on the same no fly list which includes dozens of small carriers and Garuda Indonesia.

The Airbus type involved, the A310, is a derivate of the first Airbus jet, the A300, and has none of the computer linked fly by wire systems found on contemporary Airbuses and to an extent on later Boeing designs.

It can’t be meaningfully compared with the Airbus A330-200 lost with 228 people on board in the Air France AF447 disaster of 1 June in the mid-Atlantic, or the string of control incidents involving similar A330-300 jets flown by Qantas and other carriers.

The Air France crash remains a mystery, but serious questions have been raised about unreliable air speed data experienced by the type because of icing of external air pressure measuring devices and other peculiarities in the service messages automatically transmitted from AF447 before it crashed after experiencing severe turbulence.

The differences between the A310, rarely seen in Australia, and the A330s, which are common, will not of course lessen the Airbusophobia filling talk back radio and other media.

Even the Christian Science Monitor is running hysterical reports.

However of at least 52 non-terrorist related fatal scheduled airliner crashes in the last ten years, only eight involved Airbuses and 23 were in Boeings, with the rest made up of Russian airliners, McDonnell Douglas jets and assorted commuter turboprops.

http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/07/01/...-air-disaster/

[Caius]

Airbusophobia

What a new term.

[Louis VI the Fat]

Big 'meh' to the airbusophobia talk radio. Nice to see the Christian Science Monitor Pred-Phelping about the misery and death of others.

More importantly:

13-year-old plane crash survivor speaks to her father about plunging into the sea.

The teenage girl who is the only known survivor of the Comoros plane crash that killed up to 152 people has described how she floated in the Indian Ocean clutching a piece of debris for 12 hours before her rescue.

Bahia Bakari, who sustained just a fractured collarbone and cuts and bruises to her face, told her father how she was thrown clear of the Yemenia Airbus A310 when it crashed in poor weather at 2am on Tuesday. Her mother, who was traveling with her from Paris to visit relatives in the Comoros, is among those feared dead.

Kassim Bakari, the girl's father, told French news outlets that he had spoken to his daughter on the telephone. "I asked her what happened and she said: 'We saw the plane fall in the water. I found myself in the water. I was hearing people speak but I couldn't see anyone. I was in the dark. I couldn't see anything. Daddy, I couldn't swim very well. I grabbed on to something but I don't know what'."

Bakari, who has three other children, said that when he heard about the crash he thought he would never again see his wife and oldest daughter. "She is a very, very shy girl. I would never have thought she would have survived like this. I can't say that it's a miracle, I can say that it is God's will," he said.

He said his daughter had not yet been told that her mother was dead. "They told her she was in a room next door, so as not to traumatise her. But it's not true. I don't know who is going to tell her."

Link
I've always wondered whether to call a sole airplane disaster survivor lucky or unlucky.

Either way, a very tragic story. The bit about 'daddy, I couldn't swim well', and her dead mother broke my heart when reading it. Poor thing.

[Dodge_272]

You just bought shares in Boeing?

If you are interested in buying shares in anything; buy low and sell high, you'll make the most money that way.

[LittleGrizzly]

Now if we could just figure out when its the low and when its the high then we'll be millionaires!

[rasoforos]

Airbus sucks.

Great argument...

Their planes are crud and they don't even look nice.

Yeah, it is of significant importance that your means of transportation look nice. So much more important than let's say comfort, safety, speed etc. This is why I ride Angelina Jolie to go to work every morning.

When will they ever stop killing people? Buy and fly Boeing, everybody - the experiment is over.

Fly the airline that admits that they designed an aircraft based on a model that makes airplanes that break up into pieces in real life? And that they ll add bits and pieces of metal to stop it from happening? You gotta be joking...

'The reason for the fifth delay is that the actual 787 did not behave the way the model predicted.

Specifically, Boeing found that portions of the airframe -- those where the top of the wings join the fuselage -- experienced greater strain than computer models had predicted. '

Indeed Airbus is a bus with wings, which is what an airplane is supposed to be.

Boeing is a Dodge with wings...not much different that the struggling US automakers and even more heavily subsidized.

However at the end of the day it is a matter of safety. Safety is mostly a matter of selecting a responsible airline.


http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/06/...7-safe-to-fly/

[Melvish]

Airbus sucks. Their planes are crud and they don't even look nice. When will they ever stop killing people? Buy and fly Boeing, everybody - the experiment is over.

Is Airbus suck MORE than Boeing? Not really , both companies have come up with design flaw in thier production (Boeing's tail-fin weak screw was a cause for many accident in the 80's for example).

The design flaw that begin to be outlined in the latest Airbus model is IMHO :
- Totally fly by wire plane without any 'mechanical' instruments backup.
- Badly design emergency checklist.
- Weak tail-fin????

About carbon lightweight airframe of the airbus:
-I think it is a big bonus: there are a few of case where the plane had engines failure and the pilots managed to reach an airstrip and land the plane. A feat not possible with an aluminum airframe for something that big. Fortunately the battery didn't die or they would had been screwed.