M14 As only an A300 has had the tail sheered off by rudder inputs I would argue that other than the A300 aircraft structures have been sufficiently strong to handle significant mishandling over the 40 years that jets have been flying. Furthermore as it may very well . .have been a computer problem that caused the inputs that broke the tail of the A300, more computers may not be the answer but LESS.
But also of interest is that apparently AA took an aircraft and put it up on jacks with the engines running and all kinds of things hooked up to the pitostatic system and IRSs to trick the aircraft into thinking it was in flight and some VERY interesting things have come to light.
The Load limiter on the A300 we have found works by limiting travel of the rudder pedals, it comes up from the floor limiting how far you can push the pedals. at 250 knots total travel of the pedals turned out to be 1 inch in each direction. For some reason the travel gets further again later as you go faster.
That was interesting, what was even more interesting was at 250 knots breakout force was only about 5-10 pounds less than that required to get FULL travel of the rudder. The way the aircraft performed its almost like an all or nothing system. The Sim that AA has performs nothing like that (I know).
We have just received warnings from the company about it. They did the same thing with a 757/767 and the rudder turned out to be far more predictable. The fly in the ointment of this test is that there was no airload on the fin that I know of so maybe this whole thing doesn't matter, but just the way the load limiter works (by blocking movement from the floor up rather than ratioing it) is so different from the sim and Airbus's AOM that it was eye opening.
Cheers. .Wino
[ 26 February 2002: Message edited by: Wino ]
[ 26 February 2002: Message edited by: Wino ]</p>