Posted on 04/24/2006 10:17:12 AM PDT by Yo-Yo
Rebooting Your Airbus (After All The Screens Go Dark)
April 24, 2006
By Russ Niles,
Newswriter, Editor
Cures aside, pilots of Airbus A320-series airliners are getting new guidance on what to do if the screens on their electronically biased aircraft go blank. "Checklists will be streamlined so re-booting of power is quicker," an Airbus spokesman told the London Daily Mirror after Britain's Air Accidents Investigation Branch released a report on an incident aboard a British Airways A319 last October. The plane was carrying 76 passengers to Budapest from London when most of the electronic displays went blank. The crew was able to bring everything back online in 90 seconds and the passengers were blissfully unaware of the glitch.
The incident brought to light five similar instances on Airbuses. In the October incident, the plane was over southern England when the crew heard an audible "clunk." Five of six screens went out, the intercom and radio failed, the autopilot and autothrottles disengaged and most of the cockpit lights went out. The captain took over the controls and flew night VFR (fortunately it was a clear night) while he and the first officer sorted out the power failure. The flying pilot's task was further complicated by the fact that the backup analog instruments aren't lit. The AAIB has issued a series of safety recommendations but its final report isn't finished yet.
You are not only an ignorant person, you are a very stupid one.
The person with whom I was communicating and I were very narrowly discussing computer failures in transport aircraft.
Only Airbus aircraft have ever experienced "catastrophic hull loss" as the consequence of computer failures. Off the top of my head I mentioned three of the airlines that have experienced such losses.
And I do not need to access idiot prompt sites in order to be knowledgeable in the Aviation/Aerospace industry. My resume includes more than thirty thousand command hours and a period of several years as aviation advisor to the United States Secretary of State.
This will complete our last exchange.
Than you for having shared.
Cordially - Brian
Yeah - that's because a 737 takes off every 30 seconds or so IIRC. The number of Boeing planes in the air is about four times the number of Airbuses, I believe.
Another example of why "statistics" can lie.
Hijackers do, we know that for sure.
BTW, not all the boeing stuff was serious crashes, there were a few emergency landings that skidded off, one plane got blown up in Thailand before anyone was on it, etc.
But, Airbus has had a good safety record since its last fatal crash, Boeing has had several crashes of the 737-200 series, mostly because they were old and in shoddy maintenance airlines.
Boeing and Airbus both make great planes, and they make each other better with competition.
To be more exact, Airbus has about 4000 APs in service; Boeing has over 12,000. Of these 12,000, about 4,000 are 737s. So fully one-fourth all the planes in the sky is a 737. And three-fourths of those planes are Boeing.
Remember, he's in the front of the aircraft....he has
a lot to lose too.
Well, 3 737's were lost due to the rudder problem. I'd say that was pretty bad. US Air, Turkish and United.
Boeing fixed that, just as Airbus have fixed their A300 wing problem. The A320 crash at the airshow was pilot error.
I fly all the time, sometimes on dodgy airlines and airliners. Last year, I had a choice of flying a well known dangerous airline (Phuket Air) flying 35 year old Japanese built YS-11's, or a 3rd world nation's airline (Lao Airlines) on a dodgy ATR-72, or taking a bus for 18 hours.
I flew on the Lao Airline, since then, the airline flying the YS-11's stopped flying, and the planes were junked!
"Well, 3 737's were lost due to the rudder problem..."
I thought these were due to maintenance problems - at least one from Air Alaska was.
Sounds like you will be taking the bus next time? :)
<< What about the dirty hydraulic fluid found in some of those 737's? >>
That's closer.
America's mobbed-up-union-run and/or accomodating, quota-hiring, Peter-Principled dinosaur airlines are seen to have nothing to be proud of when their security, engineering, maintenance and operational standards are examined.
None of those 737 "accidents," whose final reports reflected more accurately upon the elevator-trailing-edge-static-wick incompetence [In an ahead of the leading-edge of the pitot-head industry] of easily corruptable and often willingly corrupted room-temperature IQd "investigators," [Every one of whom had failed in the real world before becoming a bureaucrat] was caused by ANY demonstrable and/or provable inherent fault in Boeing B-737 rudders.
Well, I'm no fan of the ATR, but there was no way I was gonna get on a YAMC YS-11 that was built in the early 60's and maintained by Phuket Air. It would have been cool to say I flew one, (like when I did the IL-62 and the TU 134 and TU154), but, nothing was gonna get me to fly them!
But, with my luck, the bus would have crashed into the jungle too!
Good work, Central Scrutiniser. There's a lot of anti-Airbus xenophobia in FreeRepublic. This is another example. Had it been in a Boeing product it wouldn't have generated a tenth of the derogatory comments (yes it could happen in any glass-cockpit aircraft).
Every major airline has aircraft systems incidents, practically on a daily basis. Hydraulics, electrical, flight controls, pressurisation, fuel, engines, etc. I've seen or read of many more serious incidents that never made the news.
This one was handled routinely. It only lasted for 90 seconds and they had enough instrumentation left to aviate, navigate, and communicate. They had an attitude indicator, at least one INS (on internal battery, probably three on battery), and a VHF radio. There was no loss of altitude and no loss of separation. The crew probably filed a safety report after landing (for their company) and that was it.
Alaska Air crash was a MD-83, and that was criminal how bad their maint was.
That's not entirely a fair comparison. The most numerous crashes were with types that Boeing produced before Airbus even existed. What were the ages of the aircraft that crashed, and what airlines? An old 737-200 flown by a third world airline isn't the same as a 737NG flown by a reputable airline in a first world country. Even older models of aircraft flown by good airlines have better safety records than the same models with third or fourth tier airlines. Southwest flew 737-200's from 1971 to early 2005 and never had a single crash, injury, or fatality that was in any way associated with the operation of those aircraft. How many of the 707, 727, 737, and 747's listed had modern avionics? In the US the only commercial jet crash since 9/11 was the AA A300 near JFK.
The only problem is their composite airframe parts disintegrate when under contact with hydraulic fluid.
They haven't yet re-opened the investigation into the Airbus crash in New York after 9/11, but when they do I'll bet they figure out that the rudder came apart, and took the vertical stabilizer out with it, like this flight from Cuba almost did. The rear attach brackets on the vertical were overstressed and damaged by that incident.
Since virtually any airframe part can have hydraulic fluid in/on it, I don't trust any Airbus equipment with composite parts (probably all of them).
I only hope Boeing gets their resin system correct in the 787 so they don't have that problem, because the whole airplane will be composite.
Something good did come out of this, Brian is never going to talk to me again!
I just don't like when everyone bandwagons against Airbus and puts out all kinds of knee jerk crap about their planes.
I fly Boeing and Airbus all the time, I like them both.
Forget about that-- 3 degrees is a reasonable power-off descent ratio.
3 degrees is 300 feet/nautical mile (6000 feet).
3 x 113 = 339
answer: 33,900 feet.
Considering they had to configure and maneuver, they didn't have a lot of altitude to waste.
And I have stated many times that I think the A300 is a crap plane. Its not always the manufacturer's fault, in fact its usually the airline's fault for shoddy maintenance.
I'm just trying to counter the age old FR (Boeing good, Airbus bad) debate with some facts and figures. One poster noted a few Airbus crashes and extrapolated from that how unsafe they were. I could do the exact same thing with my data.
But, I don't, because crashes are due to all kinds of factors, and its rarely the manufacturer's fault.
You are not only an ignorant person, you are a very stupid one.
Ha! Sounds like something some Arab jihadist that has no command of the English language would write in a rant.
I agree-- Airbus and Boeing both make good products.
If one company monopolises the industry, then there really will be quality problems.
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