David - I get your point. but if you want to prove that this or that design is inherently flawed then you need criteria to determine 'safe' vs 'flawed' and by what universal standard.
Simply put, all sorts of products are put into service that haven't had the benefit of thousands of hours of testing. They have a general idea on how it will work, how it will hold up, and they put maintenance procedures in place to mitigate the design flaws.
Some times you can't look after and upkeep something so much, and thus get an STC or in the case of cars, a recall.
At issue is whether they purposefully put out a crappy unsafe product and try to cover it up. Sure, it happens.
I've noticed a number of aircraft that had what I would call an Achilles heel, that thing that I need to really watch...an item, flying characteristic, whatever...
If you are asking whether the jack screw is a problem, I think hundreds of thousands of hours of safe flying would say no, as long as it's looked at. Are there better systems, I don't know. Go research it.
If you want a windmill to joust about safety, push for hiring better pilots. The Alaska flight went down because the pilots hired flew a worsening flight control problem but defaulted to SOPS, calling dispatch as it got worse. They did what the company trained them to do and it got everyone killed.
Simply put you can fly any plane and for whatever reason it could have a problem, how you handle the problem is key....and it flies in the face of current theory that you design all the problems out of an aircraft so you can hire incompetents to fly that will never be faced with making a decision if something goes wrong outside of the check list.
Last edited by TheRobe; 13th Jan 2013 at 19:11.