RTFI
bad taste plain & simple. are you implying that airbus would conciously put pax at risk to save remanufacturing a part? idiot.
I'm not saying Airbus did this either, but there are precedents where large corporations - US automobile manufacturers have been caught out here - have made safety based decisions based purely upon cost. Who had to pay out loadsamoney when a memo was found saying it was cheaper to pay the lawsuits resulting from a bad design than fix the design itself? Business decided not to to recall the cars.
Same with seats in exit rows, putting water sprinklers in the cabin to suppress smoke, 737 rudder design, the list goes on....
Cost ALWAYS comes into the picture.
So what would have been the procedure for repairing and approving this part? It's an expensive part, certainly.
I had a chat last night with an engineer who works for a large company who manufactures these composites for aircraft - non structural only. I asked him what statistical methods were used to make sure a composite (which apparently can only confidently be said to be in good shape after you have destroyed it
) was OK to fly. The guy laughed at me and said those sort of statistics didn't really exist in aerospace. He implied that when they put an expensive part in the autoclave for curing, they will put a little test piece in there with it. They destructively test the small piece, if it passes, the large part passes too!
If they have put [i]two[/] large and expensive parts in the autoclave, and the test part fails, they destroy one of the large expensive parts. If that passes, the other large expensive part passes.
So where the hell is the science in that? Will somebody please say that's not true, or at least we shouldn't worry.