You’re assuming an ETOPS rating gives a complete guarantee nothing will ever happen, Sam, and that simply isn’t the case. ETOPS didn’t make the slightest bit of difference to the Air Transat A330 as its fuel drained away over the Atlantic. Nor did it make the slightest bit of difference with the 1996 hijacking.
Paul
1. In didn’t? By my calculations if they hadn’t changed to a NAT track further south than initially planned, they wouldn’t have made the Azores – very lucky. By flying the specific NAT Track which they did it enabled them to be closer to airports which could accommodate them (ETOPS), and so saved the aircraft, and lives of all the people on board. As i’m sure you’re aware, the incident was caused by incorrect maintenance – which could still happen, but if the correct pilot judgement was taken, the aircraft wouldn’t have run out of fuel, or at least not as early as it did. Since the incident, airbus has updated the checklist for suspected fuel leaks (closing the cross-feed valve on the overhead panel) so a similar incident should not occur.
2. The security levels on aircraft, and on the ground have been drastically increased recently, so there shouldn’t be the opportunity for people to hijack aircraft, never mind actually taking it. The 763 hijackers were rather stupid anyway, if they’d have done any research, they’d have known that with fuel quantities (+ reserves) for that flight, they’d have never got anywhere close to Oz.
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