Long time before I was born, revolutionary airplanes called COMET started to fall out of the skies. What has happened ?. .I try to recall some facts : engineers and designers have overlooked the fact that square passenger window frames with "sharp" corners in a cyclic pressurized vessel were the fatal origin of subcritical crack growth within the aluminum frame (oh yes aluminum !). The learning process started..... .Did anybody subsequently ban aluminum as a structural material to be used in modern airplanes ? No, people started to learn from those accidents.. .Ever heard of fracture mechanics and life time prediction ?. .This highly developed sience and technology is one of the fundamentals of our daily civilized life in cars, on bridges, sky scrapers, trains ..... and of course airplanes !
I am very new to the pilots business, flying as an F/O on a Jet since nearly 6 months for a big european airline an I enjoy it very much(no, not on an Airbus !). However, within the composites science and technology I have more than 10 years of profound experience especially in the area of fracture mechanics and reliability.. .I have followed this topic since this tragic event. With my little experience of flying jets I am not at all in the position to comment on the flying aspects of this accident.. .I have read many of my fellow ppruner statements concerning the materials and design issues and must say that most of it is just a mirror of pure incompetence and lack of solid scientific and technical education and understanding.
The knowledge base of fracture mechanics and life prediction within large composite structures is due to historical reasons not as big as with metals. Nevertheless, before anybody of our "hobby-experts" within this forum will come to the final composite bashing conclusion, let us stand by for the final crash investigation report.. .The learning process will start again.....
No design has ever been and will ever be 100% fool proof. Everybody who can not live with this fact, should get out of the plane and look for an other job.
CB