[Prince Charles]

Boeing makes their planes with the vertical stabilizer firmly attached to the aft bulkhead with a strong spar. The French, on the other hand, built their Airbus with no such spar -- the entire vertical stabilizer attaches via 6 bolts on the top of the fuselage, making for a much weaker joint. The $64 question is why did those joints fail? My guess is that the plane should never have been built this way, hence, a design flaw, courtesy of France.

[CdMGuy]

Well, presuming American Airlines survives its upcoming bankruptcy, lets hope they get the message and buy Boeing aircraft from here on out. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you, nothing like giving a giant F U to one of your biggest customers.

[hunter112]

We've got a saying out here in WA state:

If it's not Boeing, I'm not going

[safisoft]

Boeing makes their planes with the vertical stabilizer firmly attached to the aft bulkhead with a strong spar. The French, on the other hand, built their Airbus with no such spar -- the entire vertical stabilizer attaches via 6 bolts on the top of the fuselage, making for a much weaker joint. The $64 question is why did those joints fail?

With all the anti-French sentiment out there, I suppose it would be more fun to read the frog-bashing, but quite honestly, this is not an Airbus-only problem. The fact is that the First Officer operated the rudders in such a violent fashion in recovering from the wake of the preceding aircraft, that NO modern jet aircraft would have faired well.

When the aircraft encountered a wake from the previous aircraft, the first officer overrode the yaw damping and pushed the rudder full to one side - immediately, he pushed it the OPPOSITE direction. You ask, it obeys and 3,000 PSI was immediately applied to a rudder the size of a wing of a small corporate jet. The forces on that vertical stabilizer were enormous.

Within about 6 months ALL airline pilots throughout the industry were warned about such odd rudder inputs, and in fact the FAA suggested that the airlines begin RE-training pilots (all pilots should KNOW better) on the dangers of rudder hard overs - especially pilot-induced. I work for an airline that has BOTH Boeings and Airbus. After US Airways #427 (Boeing 737 in which the rudder UNCOMMANDED went into a hard over and loss of aircraft), we had a sobering reminder of what a Boeing looks like impacting the ground at 350 knots going straight down.

Sorry, I have over 10,000 hours in Boeings, and over a 1,000 hours in Airbus - your claim is unjustified. Also, Airbus is over 40% made by Spanish and British.