I work at NWA for 17+ years and we call our A320’s “Scarebuses”.
All Airbuses are socialist, subsidized designs with minimalism written all over the design specs.
The A320 family is fraught with either crack warranty work for framing members that join the main deck to the fuselage where the wings meet the fuselage or warranty work on the pintles for the landing gear that had fasteners that were close tolerance fasteners, instead of interference fasteners, that led to the worrying of the holes and eventual replacement of said fasteners with interference fit fasteners which led to reaming, cold working, reaming and dedicated fasteners for each hole in the rear spar (part of the wet wing[fuel]), instead of one type/size fastener. All of these dedicated fasteners have to be tracked for the rest of the airframes life. What a maintenance nightmare.
There was also warranty work for the framing area of the tail strike area.
All of this warranty work was subsidized as was the original design and production of the A320 by the EU...no wonder they're collapsing.
BTW, the A350 is the wannabe competitor for the 787.....good luck with that Airbus.
Airbus is only short term competitive on price because of the subsidizing....it's as simple as that.
Even the avionics are cheap...Team, an Airbus avionics supplier, doesn't use gold plated pins internally in the board interconnect connectors.
I fought with them for several years before they would admit the the “dirty pins” was in fact galvanic corrosion occurring.
Pieces of crap....is all I can say....(after all that????).
Years ago, Airbus management decided to support European contractors for the Electric Power Generating Systems (EPGS) on their new aircraft and the new A340-600 was to be the first to have an all-Lucas Electrics (UK) EPGS. This was too much even for the biggest users of Airbus products, including Lufthansa in Europe and Northwest Airlines in the U.S.
The major carriers refused any aircraft with Lucas (aka “The Prince of Darkness”) as the primary EPGS. So, Airbus compromised and was forced to use the UTC Corp. Hamilton-Sundstrand EPGS as primary and Lucas for Auxiliary Power. But, as a final slap at Lucas, Hamilton-Sundstrand did all the aftermarket support for engineering and spare parts for Lucas products! Lucas was a world leader when it came to non-customer support and the airlines weren't about to be stuck with the Lucas albatross.
Entry of the A340-600 into service was a mixed bag. The Hamilton-Sundstrand EPGS performed well, but the Lucas Aux Generators were failing like popcorn due to main rotor bearing failure. When the main bearings failed, the debris fouled the cooling oil and, since the Aux Gen and APU turbine shared the same oil supply, this led to failure of the very expensive APU. Lucas was unable to fix the problem, so H-S had to come up with a working fix, the service bulletins to fix the problem, and field the kits for operators to make the fixes. Once implemented, the bearing failure in the Lucas Aux Gen went away.
I will not fly on an A320 of any kind. The A320 has the reputation of a flight control computer system that has been either the direct or contributing factor in at least three fatal and one nonfatal (that scared both crew and passengers almost to death). One of the fatal incidents was the crash of the A320-111 demonstrator on 26 June 1988. Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A320_family#Accidents_and_incidents.