Originally Posted by
ShotOne
“I don’t think I said this accident was down to a design fault..”. Er, you did actually, Chug. And your suggested fix hasn’t been deemed necessary by the regulatory authorities of the thousands of Airbuses that have clocked up squillions of flight hours over the last thirty-odd years.
That was my response to your post:-
Point well made regarding the perjury acquittal Chugalug but not your final-paragraph conclusion that it’s all down to a design fault. No. Every aircraft ever built has a pinch-point between something and its controls. Decades of safe operation by over 1,300 other A330s plus nearly 6,000 A320 family jets with an identical “design fault” suggests this is undue loyalty on your part to the defendant.
What I
had actually said was:-
The tragedy in all this is that there would appear to have been a design fault in the pinch point between control stick and arm rest in which anything could have jammed. Has this been mitigated, or is it now simply an offence to allow this known hole to align with all the waiting other holes?
I didn't claim that it was
all down to a design fault, as you well know. Very few accidents are down to any one thing, hence the Swiss Cheese model. The defendant pleaded guilty to negligence and was sentenced accordingly, but clearly there was a pinch point between his armrest and his Voyager side stick for his negligently placed camera to be trapped in, otherwise the very serious accident that followed would not have occurred! As I and another poster have pointed out, the same pinch point could trap anything else placed there.
It was you who stated that there is an identical pinch point on other airbus aircraft. If that is the case
then common sense would suggest that some form of mitigation be introduced on all such common types. My suggestion of a touch sensitive pad on the end of the armrest was only one of any number of possible common sense solutions. Restricting the depth to which the arm rest can be lowered is another. I remain convinced that this issue has been considered and mitigation sought, if not by the RAF then by others. I said previously that I would be greatly surprised if that were not case, only to have a response from itsnotthatbloodyhard:-
Prepare to be greatly surprised.
Very amusing, but aviation notoriously has no sense of humour. This accident can happen again. The whole point about Flight Safety is to prevent a recurrence, or don't we do that any more?