Slim-Slag
Couldn't have put it better myself -so I won't. There is a lot more one could say but there's not much point posting it all here. I've written about eight pages on the subject in the last four hours. Data is plentiful, knowledge is not. But enough has been said that I think everyone has the general idea. The AD, if you read it, gives adequate insight into the paucity of inspection and test technologies. It requires you to gaze peerlessly at the areas in question, utilising a strong light if necessary. That sounds like wishful thinking where composite's are concerned but adequately demonstrates that it's an area where the FAA's brightest need more than just a strong light and a magnifying glass. They too will need to call in some fractography experts and buy a machine or two. An extract from a letter to Farley Esq below:
".. (glass-fibre sets exothermically, while carbon-fibre is an endothermic process). When the aviation industry got into the thermo-plasticand thermoset game, they were very cautious inasmuch as it was doors, hatches, fillets and fairings only - for quite a while. They gained experience in laying up composites and the black art of setting the angle of weave of each layer of the cloth matrix became a science. There was a great selection of resins. However when they then crossed the Rubicon into structures they only had that sort of passive panel experience and designing for load-bearing was a suck it and see over-design/over-build process (with lotsa testing to destruction as a confidence builder). Those tests were with aged, as in cured, (but not aging) resins and composites. I owned a Messerschmidt Boelkow Bloehm Phoebus C (VH-GYA) designed by the famed Dr Eppler. It had a mighty balsa substrate with glass overlay and weighed a ton. That airplane came out in 1965 and is still going strong at Cunderdin WA. I reglassed it myself after a number of bingles (never mine) and I was always happier that it was a true hybrid composite. The wing fittings were embedded metal and the all-flying tail's likewise. I could easily live with that but I freely admit that I have great pause for thought when I consider metal brackets hugging composite lugs in the manner shown here and the piccies below. Methinks they have since maybe gotten a little overconfident and that AA587 may just be the proof of that."
I don't endorse the whimsical notion that you'll find now on the front page of aero-news:
http://www.aero-news.net/
They are suggesting that there's a mystically strange empennage destructive flutter mode that's peculiar to the A300 and excitated by wake turbulence. I think that the answer's much simpler (as per what has been said already and in particular in the last two posts (by slimslag and whizzjet).