Well done WD. IIRC didn’t you have a command on the B1900 before?

Sorry TTP, I don’t know.

Wysiwyg, i have indeed,the guy who owns the sim is a good freind of mine.I never had to pay to go flying as i got a shed load of spares (instruments ) for him,i first flew G-AWZQ in 1993. 🙂

Ahh Andy Mattacks. Good bloke.

Trident Man – have you flown BA’s old Trident sim which is now located on a farm near Biggin Hill. A year or so ago it used to be hired out for £70 per hour. I presume it’s still available. It has night visuals and full motion. Skycruiser used it to practice before his Cathay sim ride a few years ago.

So long as he doesn’t stick all the aircraft on the Irish reg and do a MOL!

I would imagine Airbus must be rubbing their hands together with glee over this announcement!

Well you have to nip these things in the bud when you can see the tone being set!!!

And not the first time this has happened to an Airbus if I recall correctly…

Apparently it’s not a design fault 😮
JC

Undoubtedly not a good thing to have happen…but considerably less problematic than having it do an unrequested hardover!!!

This is turning into a great debate.

You say ‘the four engines doesn’t just increase your chance of a diversion due to engine failure’ but it most definitely does if you want an aircraft to land everytime one plays up. If that rule was bought in then we’ll all be flying ETOPS tomorrow!

The problem as I see it with your analogy is that cars are never operated particularly far from a place where they can easily drop in for a service! 4 engined aircraft were originally conceived to be able to continue when a failure had occurred and not to have to pull over. Let me explain…

To simplify matters let’s put the whole ETOPS things to one side as that’s a whole different kettle of fish. In general, twin engine aeroplanes ply the skies of airspace where there are loads of bolt holes to dive into in the event of a failure (eg, chugging round Europe or accross mainland US). When it came to designing long haul aeroplanes the designers had to cope with the fact there would now be large areas covered with no options for a diversion so they designed aircraft that could continue with a fault.

A couple of months ago I flew to Tokyo. From Helsinki in Finland to Sapporo in Northern Japan (over 8 hours flying time) there was no airfield that I would have voluntarily chosen to divert to due to weather conditions and runway contamination. We carried enough extra fuel to be able to suffer a decompression at the most inconvenient point and fly to Helsinki or Sapporo at low level. This fuel was also sufficient to cover an engine out situation at the worst point and any other reasonable possibility. The likelihood is that if something like a straightforward engine failure occurs it wouldn’t actually happen at the exact worst point so there is a good chance you may recalculate and find that you have enough fuel to either return to base or make it to destination. These conditions are fairly common when crossing Siberia and are planned for on a regular basis. Consequently the operation is safe. The fact is that if we put the aircraft down at somewhere like Yakutsk we would now have a serious problem, crew out of hours, several hundred people needing to be put up at no notice in questionable ‘hotels’, no spare parts, no engineer capable of doing certifiable repairs, the list goes on…

Similarly a few weeks ago I flew to Jo’burg. Now if you were a passenger on board and we had a simple failure there’s not many places between Tunis and Gabarone you’d want to be stuck on the ground without support. Imagine depositing a couple of hundred western women in Lubumbashi! It’d be carnage. However we take these things into consideration in our planning in the same way that the designers ensure to the best of their ability that the aircraft does not need to stop. This does not make the operation of the aircraft unsafe.

Now, I’m sure for a while you’ve been saying ‘but that’s over Siberia’ or ‘that’s over deepest darkest Africa but I’m talking about the US and the Atlantic’. Well yes the BA flight did take place over more civilised skies but that is irrelevant. If it is safe for us to fly over large portions of desert/polar/jungle/etc and be considered safe with a failure then the same is still true if you are overflying civilisation.

You know the funny thing about all this is that the BA crew did in fact have enough fuel to get to LHR. Unfortunately they had a separate failure (I believe at a much later stage of flight) of a fuel pump which rendered some of the fuel on board unusable so the need to go to MAN only appeared at a late stage and was nothing to do with not getting the right levels, etc. At all points of the flight they had airfields to divert into (Salt Lake City, Calgary, Winnipeg, Iqaluit, Goose Bay, Keflavik, Glasgow and of course Manchester). All in all I would say that the risks were assessed and correctly identified as being negligable. Consequently the commercial decision was the right one to take.

Regards
Wys