Tail section repair... happened in Toulouse, on the manufacturer premises. If so, there is no reason to suspect Airbus for not doing the job properly.
You would certainly hope so. That said, the JAL-146SR was repaired by Boeing...
8 Sep 1985
The Boeing Company acknowledged Friday that it had made faulty rear-cabin repairs in 1978 on a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 that crashed in Japan last month, killing 520 of the 524 people on board.
But the company added that further analysis was needed ''to determine whether this repair contributed to the accident.'' It was the worst single-plane crash in history.
The company said that the problem involved a relatively small section of the splice its team fashioned in reassembling upper and lower halves of the pressure bulkhead in the rear of the passenger cabin. It said, too, that all evidence indicated the bulkhead ruptured in flight and caused pressurized air in the passenger cabin to rush out to the rear.
Disclosure of a faulty repair was made initially by The New York Times on Friday. The Boeing statement took issue with a part of the report, attributed to authorities involved in the inquiry, that the improper assembly had to do with some missing rivets.
Defect in Riveting
''A splice plate added during the repair was incorrectly installed in this small section of the splice such that one of three rows of rivets did not pass through the splice plate,'' the company said. The small section amounted to about 17 percent of the splice, according to the statement.
The 1978 damage to the plane occurred when it made a landing at Osaka so severe that 30 people were injured. The Boeing team, sent to the scene from company headquarters in Seattle, repaired 54 feet of skin under the lower fuselage and replaced the lower half of the bulkhead, which then had to be attached to the original upper half.
The bulkhead, shaped somewhat like an umbrella canopy, is at the very back of the passenger cabin. It separates the cabin, which is highly pressurized in flight, from the unpressurized tail cone of the plane, which is behind it.
At least two key issues remain to be resolved. One is whether the improper repair led to the bulkhead rupture. The second is where the rearward rush of air was what caused the catastrophic damage to the tail's vertical fin.
Plane Struck Mountain
The still-unproven theory is that the air rushing rearward could have turned upward into the hollow tail fin, punched out the leading edge of the vertical tail structure, and thereby caused the plane to fly wildly out of control. It rammed into a mountain 30 minutes later.
Boeing officials would be relieved if it can be verified that the improper repair in fact caused the disaster. That would remove any concern that more than 600 747's in service in the world have an inherent defect and that a repeat of the Japanese crash is a continuing danger.
In Japan, aviation officials expressed surprise at the Boeing acknowledgement of the faulty repair.
Hiroaki Kono, head of Japan Airline's maintenance division, said: ''If the repairs are incorrect, it is a serious matter.''
Shiro Oshima, an official of the Ministry of Aviation, said: ''I'm surprised to hear of the Boeing announcement, which is quite new to me.''