Originally Posted by
MurphyWasRight
The point though is that like the UAS the O ring erosion was a known issue that was swept under the rug with "nothing bad has happened" etc.
I wouldn't call a worldwide Service Bulletin mandating the replacement of all Thales AA pitot tubes on Airbus A330/340 aircraft a case of sweeping the issue under the rug, would you?
As far as the Space Shuttle Challenger incident goes, the reason the Thiokol managers overrode their engineers (under intense pressure from NASA, don't forget) was because they were competing for the renewal of their contract to supply the SRB assemblies, and they feared that exposing a weakness in their product to the customer during the competitive phase would work against them. A similar thing happened with the DC-10 cargo door debacle - Convair (the supplier of the fuselage assemblies, including the cargo doors) knew of the problems and had encountered them in testing, but upper management at Convair downplayed the risk to McDonnell-Douglas, fearing that their supply contract might be endangered.
In this case, Airbus, Air France and Thales all have some stake in them owned by the French State, so it's unlikely that such contractual shenanigans would be a problem. The one time that politics may have been played (Habsheim), it backfired on all parties in a bad way.
Despite the Challenger disaster, Morton Thiokol retained their supply contract to build STS SRB units, presumably in part because when one makes such a major mistake in public, efforts to avoid any such thing happening again will be redoubled. I'd be very surprised if the same isn't true of the BEA (as I said earlier, note their bringing in of the NTSB as an independent observer in the Air Inter accident). The Airbus FBW technology is proven and flies people around the world safely every day - there's nothing to hide anymore.