This particular model of airbus has a trap laid out in it and no one wants to accept it. Ark Royal. Do you really believe the pilot INTENDED to reverse the rudder quickly several times in few seconds? I guarantee you he did not intend to do that. If he didn't INTEND to do it, then its a problem with the airplane. The controlls of an airplane should be intuitive. They should respond in a predictable manner. In this area of the flight envelope of the A300 they most certainly do not.
while it is exceptionally rare that you should need to use the rudder at faster than landing speeds, it DOES happen. Once in a career. Possibly more rarely than an engine failure.
The A300 is the ONLY airplane in the world where it is not POSSIBLE to apply cooridinated rudder should you need to for what ever reason.,
If you TRY and use coordinated rudder in the A300 at 250 knots it is a virtual guarantee that you will start banging the stops.
If it is your opinion ARK royal that the rudder should NEVER be used at that speed, then it should be locked out.
I have several thousand hours in the aircraft, at the airline and took all the courses that Sten Molin and Ed States were alledged to have taken. I guarantee you they are NOT what you THINK you know from TV or news, and that Airbus did a masterfull job of covering up a REAL defficiency in their aircraft.
ARKROYAL and ALL the others here, if you can show me ONE just one aircraft out of the 10s of thousands of transport category jets worldwide that excede its rudder load limits in a similar manner to 587 I will accept your premise of pilot error.
On the other hand out of 300 or so A300600rs world wide, I can show you 4 at 3 different airline that have had similar events.
Thats a PATTERN. Well documented and VERY serious a real handling problem with a small fleet of aircraft.
I can lay out HOW the aircraft has this problem. The break out force (Force required to get the rudder moving at all) is MUCH TO HIGH RELATIVE TO THE FORCE TO REACH THE STOP.
The Rudder sensitivity increases by an order of magnitude with speed.
Airbus arrogence is such that they would rather kill more people than admit they made a mistake and implement a cheap and effective fix. All the AA bashers are either simply yank bashing or taking the easy way out. Certainly not the first time we have seen that in aviation.
AA operates over 800 Jets of MD80 size or larger. If it was an AA handling issue, then surely there would have been events in 767s, 777 MD80s, MD-11 DC-10s etc... Yet there is none. Explain that one? Yet the SMALLEST fleet at AA (35 A300 jets) had two events. the other 750+ had none. HMMMMM statitstics don't bear out any of the Yank/AA bashers.
When someone shows me problems with other AA aircraft handling, or a POI of ANY type of transport category of a different aircraft type about the Yaw Axis, ANYWHERE in the world I will recant.
Cheers
Wino
Last edited by Wino; 8th Dec 2004 at 12:42.