A320 Down
 

A320 Airbus down in the Alps. 148 presumed dead.

Has not been a good couple of yeras for airliners.

Nowadays you don't know what brings them down.

Especially Airbus.

All 150 people on board dead.
Took an alternative route because of bad weather conditions.
http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/d-aipx/#5d42675


It makes me the more sad that all "official condoleances" and official statements are done via Twitter&Co.

:( Very sad.

Prayers to family and loved ones of those lost.

One more flat stall ?

IIRC, a few of our commercial pilot buddies here have said in the past "If its not Boeing, I'm not going".

Thats my mantra

When flt 447 crashed over the Atlantic, I was blown away when it was revealed how the flight control systems on an Airbus deal with conflicting inputs. It averages out the inputs without informing the pilots that they are taking opposite actions. Insane.

I think there might be room for error with "fly by wire "

The 320 family of Airbus jets has been flying in revenue service for twenty seven years. Almost 6,200 are in service today. So, those pilots who say "if it ain't Boeing, I ain't going" are embarrassingly clueless.

I currently fly the Airbus. I formerly flew the Boeing 737. Both are great airplanes.

Before we start blaming Airbus, let's wait until some info comes out. Right now, we only know that it went down.

This is incorrect. The airplane DOES tell you that there are dual inputs - VERY clearly and with no ambiguity.

This is a budget airline. It may be unrelated but I really don't know if you wan to be on a budget when flying ... the plane sure sounds like it had a few miles. According to Der Spiegel magazine, the plane was delivered to Lufthansa new in 1991 and is one of the oldest 320s still in service with production number 147. Airbus said it had about 58k hours and 46k flights under its belt.

That's impressive. 58k hours! That's almost 7 continuous years in the air. If you had a car with 58k hours, and estimate about 30-40 mph average speed, you'd have hit 2,000,000 miles. Of course I'd think they rebuild these and refresh as needed, just as you would on a 2 million mile car that's still safe to drive. But still ...

At least they won't have to look for it in the pacific. :(

G

The stall warning was going off until they were in such a deep stall that the computer thought the readings were erroneous. Most definitely pilot error/lack of training in this case. Ironically they were in alternate law which gives the pilots more control similar to a Boeing aircraft.

You know what? F--- CNN and their stupid, uninformative, insensitive headlines. F--- them.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1427222951.jpg

^ Amen. Shame on you, Laura Smith, Jason Hanna, and Greg Bothelho. Shame on CNN for idiotic headlines.

Absolutely. Even if an A320 fell out of the sky every single day, they would still be a safe airplane. I'm flying an A320 Germanwings flight in a few weeks from Berlin to LHR. I am not worried in the least. RIP to the people on board this flight.

Well if they fell out of the sky every day I would think we have a pilot problem.

For three year I commuted a couple time a month from Long Beach, CA. to Portland, OR. always flying Alaska (737) or JetBlue (320) I much preferred JetBlue and flew them every chance I got... never a problem... on just that route They (JB) fly every few hours every day.

58K hours is a lot but.....

In the summer of 1993, two men, Neil Rose and Bob Irvine, from Vancouver, Washington, bought the ship and flew it west. They are currently restoring it to its original 1937 Eastern Air Lines configuration and livery. In August 1993, it had 91,400.2 hours on the airframe.13 It has been in the air the equivalent of more than 10 and a half years, and has a record only another DC-3 will ever match. Each day it flies it breaks its own record adding a little more to this insurmountable achievement.

For the rest of the story on high time aircraft.

Amazing History Douglas DC3, Dakota, C47, R4D, DC1, DC2 A/C

I did that flight two weeks ago. There are zero mountains on that route. You pretty much fly over the flattest parts of Germany, Holland, then the Channel and then England. On a clear day you can easily figure out the whole route by watching out the window.

I'm reading a live blog on a German newspaper site now and they're saying a lot of Germanwings crews are refusing to show up for work and lots of flights are being canceled. This is gonna be such a mess. It also says Spanish police have begun reviewing security camera footage of the passengers and crew boarding the doomed flight to see if they recognize any bad guys.

I don't do scarebus.

They should have scrapped it after 3 years like those Frontier A318s.

I work in aerospace. 99% of reporting on aircraft incidents is so ignorant it is borderline criminal. Capitalizing on fear = ratings, and they milk it for all its worth.

They way the news was describing it, that fly by wire was a good thing. If I hadn't spend a bunch of time reading here, I wouldn't know otherwise.

fify

From a position of ignorance then..............................
why was the input conflict on Air France 447 not recognised?

Seriously, I have no predetermined position here...educate me.

:confused:

Fixed it for you.

Lay press=ignorance.

I am constantly astonished by the standard of reporting in any area in which I happen to have an above average area of expertise (or even a passing interest), even in the "quality" press with "expert advisors" on hand.

Only yesterday, the ABC (Aussie equivalent of BBC) was breathlessly reporting as a world first (with in depth interviews from scientific experts) a particular animal behaviour (carnivority in nectarivores..thanks for asking) that has been recognised since...oh, the late '30s.

From what I remember, there wasn't an input "conflict" on 447. The flying pilot was pulling back on the controller, but the opposite pilot's control doesn't mirror that, so he wasn't aware that he was. That, coupled with the stall horn likely confusing things, seems to be at the root of 447.

This crash likely has nothing to do with 447 or fly-by-wire. Plane reaches fl380, is there for a couple minutes, and begins a 3000fpm descent. No communication whatsoever. Something, hypoxia or ... disabled the flight crew, probably after they managed to initiate an emergency descent. Plane would have likely flown on except for the height of the surrounding terrain. Most of the pilots over at pprune seem to think it was some sort of explosive decompression. That leaves open all sorts of scenarios.

How long does it take to get the data out of the flight recorders?

In the Air France crash over the Atlantic the first officer kept yanking his side-stick to full nose-up each time the stall warning sounded. The captain had come back into the cockpit and was trying to recover the jet from the deep stall and when they'd lower the nose the stall warning, which went silent when the jet was fully stalled, came back on. The FO panicked and yanked his stick back. The captain overrode the FO's stick input at least once--each stick has an override button for the other stick--but the panicked FO overrode the captain's override and kept the jet in the deep stall. I hate to admit pilot error as an airline pilot but pilot error played a major part in the Air France loss.

I'm a Boeing guy so the Airbus guys are welcome to correct or clarify my explanation.

This is such baloney.

Fatal plane crash rates by model
The A320-line of planes (includes A318, A319, A321) log 0.10 deaths per 1 million flights. The Boeing 737 logs 0.28 deaths per million flights! Newer variants of the 737 pull even with the A320, but nowhere do we see the Airbus planes with a worse record in terms of deaths/flights.

Speaking of stats, can someone tell me how many hours the average airliner flies before it is retired? Looks like 95% of the A320s are still flying!

G

Any reporting does this. I have been on the ground several times, figuratively speaking, on events that were reported on. The difference between reality and the news was always staggering. Most of it was for maximized headline / scandal / fear etc. effect.

G

The problem with your comparison is that you've lumped all of the 737s together even though they span several generations of aviation technology. Back in the day flying was dangerous. The -100/-200 were little basically snub nose 707s an as such they even had windows for navigating with sextants. At a minimum you need to compare the CFM56-powered 737s to the A320.

And yeah, established, financially well-off airlines like Southwest avoid the scarebus like the plague.

No expert on the models, but Boeing 737-600/700/800/900, are those newer? That group has 0.08 deaths/mil flights, so practically the same. I think that A320s were at 0.08 before this crash. :(

So, even with that correction towards newer model Boeings, there isn't statistics showing the Airbus is unsafe compared to the Boeing. Otherwise they would not be competitive and would not have sold over 6k of them.

G

I'm not suggesting they're inherently dangerous. But I do think they're chintzy under powered flying culverts built by a socialist work program and sold by the crack dealer of commercial aviation.

Upstairs in an A380 is about as nice as it gets. Amazing ride. Much nicer than anything by Boeing.