Originally Posted by
Fantome
...getting it right on the drawing board and making them Boeing tough?
It's not about brand B being tougher than brand A and never was. While the 747SP deserves kudos for hanging together in that China Airlines incident, you're talking about a completely different scenario causing completely different load factors on the airframe.
That incident involved a spiral dive - to cut a long description short, the torsional/bending loads are spread across the airframe and occur primarily to structures with spars, such as the wings and horizontal stab. The vertical stab will take some heavy punishment, but the loads only occur in one direction. Reversed sideslips of the kind that brought down AA587 apply almost all the torsion loads to the vertical stab - which is dangerous enough, but when you add in the reversals it quickly becomes more than any design of that size and that nature can handle.
As the photo earlier in the thread shows, not even the 747 has a spar or structural member going from the fuselage to the vertical stab. Like the A300 and pretty much every other aircraft of the type, the vertical stab is simply bolted on through lugs.
Brian - thanks for the clarification on the identity of our FUD merchant.
Airbus has quietly inspected, fixed, and stiffened up all the tails.
Utter rubbish. Inspected and fixed those that needed fixing yes, but there was no programme to "quietly" make changes to all of them because it simply wasn't necessary.
Wouldn't it be nice - particularly on Tech Log - to see a dispassionate debate on the causes of an accident...
@Chris Scott - Amen!