In his post below, Shannon states that there are serious questions about the Airbus 300/310 safety, but that European political considerations and prestige might prevent a comprehensive investigation ino the matter. Those are pretty heavy allegations. Now if you look at the post Shannon is linking to, and that obviously has inspired him to make these allegations, the basis for them does look pretty flimsy:
…we have Canada whose rather vicious cycle of lies of late would made the Clintons blanch; and the world-wide left still ticked off that we have an embargo against the socialist worker’s paradise.
I can see why it’d take a week for this story to break; It’d take ’em that long to figure out how to spin it.
It’s become clear, though that the 310 is an accident waiting to happen… And the EU and it’s apologists don’t want that info getting public. They may not, however, be able to hold it off, this time.
It’s quite clear that Eric has a political axe to grind here; he doesn’t offer a shred of evidence for his accusations. There’s also a lot of interesting information in the comments section that runs contrary to the thrust of Eric’s and Shannon’s posts.
It also has to be considered that the A 310 has been around since 1983, so its track record doesn’t look bad at all. It’s not as if there hadn’t been any problems with comparable models by Boeing during that same period. The Boeing 737 had problems with its yaw damper and the rudder system in general:
Over the years, pilots around the world have filed hundreds of reports of 737 flights disrupted by uncommanded rudder movements.
Many safety experts believe the most extreme of such movements – an uncommanded hardover – is what caused two highly publicized and unsolved 737 crashes in the U.S. this decade. United Airlines Flight 585 dived from the sky into a park near Colorado Springs on March 3, 1991, killing 25 passengers and crew members. The plunge of USAir Flight 427 near Pittsburgh on Sept. 8, 1994, killed all 132 on board.
Since the Pittsburgh crash, there have been more than 70 reports of 737 flights briefly thrown off course in a manner that suggests rudder malfunctions.
A complex system like a commercial airliner simply can’t be made 100 % safe, the risk can only be minimized, so calling Airbus unsafe on the facts known so far is uncalled for.
Here’s an interesting debate on the matter at a forum frequented by airline pilots, for some additional information.
