Peter Bach - with the exception of our former Sabena friend on the first page, this thread is a remarkably well behaved one!
BahrainLad - you're not joking. I was at Gamco earlier this year when one of the ex Delta L15s was undergoing a predelivery C check to Portuguese charter operator Yestours. It was in such great shape mechanically - despite having been stored for over a year - that Yes were able to save nearly US$500,000 on their budget. No corrosion anywhere; no technical snags; the only problems were three slat delaminations (two out of limits, one in limits).
Next to this aircraft was a brand new A330 in one of the special GF schemes. Already two weeks late out of C check, there were still pages of snags outstanding - and they had found a couple of areas of serious corrosion and nearly sixty(!) cracks.
The problem, as it was explained to me, is simple. The L1011 (and the DC10, and early 747s) were designed by hand with sliderules - and therefore everyone built in significant margins of error. Lockheed, for example, recalculated their original design specifications and came up with a revised airframe life of 125,000 hours! On the other hand, modern aircraft are built with CADCAM using the latest supercomputers, and designed to micrometer tolerances. You know that when you have a design life of 20,000 cycles on an A340, on 20,001 the wings will fall off.
In order to save weight, the skins are a fraction of the thickness of those on older generation aircraft. Check it out next time you board an aircraft. Thicker skins = more weight = more fuel to fly around the place = lower payloads and/or range.
Of course, thinner skins = more susceptible to damage/more cracks/more corrosion = higher maintenance costs; but hey, you can't have it all!
411A - the biggest problem with the Delta birds is that they are
fully, and I mean
fully run out. Airframe. Gear. APU. Engines. Interiors. Add to that the fact that DL don't know what they have in the way of spares, tooling etc and you'll see why I'm still waiting until DDM offers me money to take them away!
