Originally Posted by
syseng68k
I don't quite see the connection there. It's almost as though you are implying that you shouldn't fly in any new a/c until it's at least 5 years old, to get all the bugs shaken out, which seems like a spurious argument.
Not at all - it's just statistically more likely that there will be a marginally higher risk of an incident or accident in the first years of a new airframe's life. The chances of being in an accident when boarding a new type are still incredibly unlikely.
But the facts bear this out - the 727 had a series of very nasty accidents in the first few years of service due to a combination of pilots getting to grips with the tail-heavy aspect of the design in combination with the powerful flaps causing a much higher bleeding-off of airspeed on approach than they had hitherto been used to. Both the Comet and the DC-10 revealed serious design flaws in their first few years of service (and the L-1011 revealed a minor one, regarding the weight -on-column required to disengage the automatics). The 737 proved that it wasn't as longitudinally stable as the 727 (unlike the 727 you couldn't rescue a fast approach by throwing the gear out early) and the A320 had some mode-confusion issues in her early days (of which Habsheim was *not* an example).
Those are just some examples, but I think it's a pretty good rule of thumb. It's a testament to the improving quality of aeronautical engineering over the years that the number of these incidents has gone down dramatically (the 757's record was unblemished until the mid-'90s and the 777 has suffered only a single hull-loss, as has the A340 in service).
While you may need to wait a few years before upgrading to any new
version of windows, (I'm still using W2k on one development machine, but
for other reasons), a/c are not quite the same thing.
Believe me - that's not the comparison I'm making! For a start, home and business OS "teething problems" usually *are* down to flaws in the design and implementation rather than the users getting used to how they operate. This isn't relevant to an aviation discussion though.
I doubt if there is meaningfull difference in the figures anyway, as accident rates, in terms of flight hours are down in the noise...
Funnily enough, it was A33Zab who brought up the safety record, not me...