Hydraulics
Correct sir, OAG due to water contamination of the fluid, circa 1981. Not QUITE the same results or implications as the AF incident, but it was a lesson learned by all. At this time in the early 80's no one anywhere quite realised how sensitive M2V was to hygroscopic contamination. A rigid airtight storage regime for M2V was employed after that, with no further reported cases of M2V contamination. Not quite the same as filling up with Skydrol though, I think you will agree.
As a point of interest to all other sensible posters here (that excludes one who obviously learned aircraft from a book, I sometimes wonder if he even knows which end that the pilot sits), AF had some flying control surface panel failures, they were as undramatic as the BA ones. They had fewer, because as the majority of people here realise, AF flew a fraction of the hours of the British A/C. These failures were due to water ingestion into imperfections in the control surface, causing delamination. As the aircraft spent the majority of it's life at 400 deg's K, the expansion caused the delams to seperate. It is unlikely that a subsonic A/C would have had a similar problem (as a matter of interest, these failures only occured after MANY thousands of supersonic flying hour)s. I hope that most of you accept that my comments here are not my opinions, they are generally facts borne out by a huge number of years of technical knowledge and experience.
It is good that there is so much in the way of constructive comments made here by the vast majority of posters.
Last edited by M2dude; 5th Feb 2010 at 23:04.