Originally Posted by
Firstpost
Just a practical thought. Would this count as a hull-loss? Pretty rotten to get a hull-loss in the statistics because of this.
And in that direction, if it's not a hull-loss in that sense, does anyone know the criteria? I'd say it's not the same thing (in the statistics for safe airline) to have an aircraft destroyed in an accident during operation or destroyed by something like this incident, or even damaged beyond repair at night by vandals.
I believe that under ICAO Annex 13 it will count as an "aviation accident"
IF any crew (at least, or crew and pax) were on board for the flight (sounds like this may not be the case), if so, and it's written off, then it's a hull loss. Otherwise it would just be a total loss for insurance purposes.
Hull losses are also a financial decision rather than an extent-of-damage indicator - airlines can (and do...) game the stats, if they want to, by paying to repair aircraft that are actually uneconomical to repair. Equally, the odds of a write off depend on how old the airframe is, be pretty rotten to get a hull loss purely because your new a/c went tech and you had to take the much older spare, wouldn't it?
There are many other problems with "hull loss" as a classification. How do you classify crashes on test flights for instance? How about crashes when showing off (badly) at airshows? How do you handle Malaysian, for instance? Two 777 hull losses, but MH17 is being
excluded from some safety stats (I believe) because it was shot down, a terrorist act, not an accident (how, by what, or by whom is disputed, by one country at least), however MH370 is
included, despite the fact that it also has a disputed cause and
might have been a terrorist act, or a fire, or <insert favourite conspiracy theory here>.
Hull losses are just not that much use for "safe airline" stats, there are generally so few of them that you can decide what you want to conclude, collect your stats, analyse each incident and pretty much pick an exclusion criteria that is "fair" and will deliver the conclusion you wanted.