Airbus to Recommend Inspections of A300, A310 Planes (Update1)
March 14 (Bloomberg) -- Airbus SAS, the world's biggest planemaker, will tell airlines to inspect the rudders of 400 aircraft worldwide after most of a tail part fell off during a flight earlier this month, a company spokesman said.
Airbus will take the action for A310 and A300-600 planes ``out of an abundance of caution'' after most of the rudder came off an Air Transat plane at cruising altitude, the spokesman, Clay McConnell, said in an interview. The plane, an A310 carrying 261 passengers and nine crew from Cuba to Quebec City, was forced to return to Cuba about 30 minutes after takeoff.
Airbus will tell airlines to conduct inspections, usually done every five years, within a few weeks, McConnell said. The carrier is recommending visual inspections and a so-called ``tap'' audio analysis to determine whether there are internal flaws in the carbon-fiber rudder, he said. A310 and A300-600 planes have identical rudders, he said.
``We don't know yet what happened'' with the Air Transat plane, McConnell said. ``We feel that this event is so unusual it really does require that we do something to be sure that there's not a problem out there.''
McConnell said Airbus will make the recommendation in a bulletin to operators, probably on Wednesday. French regulators will probably require the inspections, and other aviation regulators around the world, including the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, are expected to follow suit, McConnell said.
Examinations
Canadian aviation investigators are still examining the Air Transat incident and haven't determined why most of the rudder came off. The rudder is a movable part of the plane's vertical tail fin used to push the aircraft's nose left and right during cross-wind landings and engine outages.
Air Transat inspected all 10 of the A310s it operates on the day of the incident. They were released back into service within hours, said spokeswoman Rachel Andrews. Air Transat, Canada's largest charter carrier, is a unit of Transat A.T. Inc.
U.S. operators of the A310 and A300-600 planes include FedEx Corp., AMR Corp.'s American Airlines and United Parcel Service Inc. McConnell said he didn't know how much the inspections would cost or whether the evaluations could be done as part of routine maintenance. Airlines will pay the cost of the inspections, he said.
Canadian investigators examined the Air Transat aircraft last week in Cuba and so far have found no problems with the hydraulics that operate the rudder, said Marc Fernandez, senior investigator with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. The rudder that detached hasn't been found, he said.
Structure
``Structure-wise we don't have much left of the rudder there, so what we've decided to do is remove the whole tail of the aircraft,'' Fernandez said. Airbus investigators will return to Cuba Thursday to remove the tail section for further analysis, he said.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board last October ruled that an American Airlines pilot caused a fatal November 2001 crash of an A300-600 in New York with ``unnecessary and excessive'' rudder movements that resulted in the plane's vertical tail fin snapping off.
The sensitivity of the A300-600 jet's rudder control system contributed to the accident that killed 265 people, as did pilot training by American, the board said. Flight 587 crashed less than two minutes after leaving John F. Kennedy International Airport on Nov. 12, two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The tail fin remained on the plane in the Air Transat incident, which is unrelated to the New York accident, Fernandez said.