The English, Canadian, German and I believe the Italian Discovery channel will be running a program in the near future covering the Air Transat A 330 Glider incident. The program is in the Mayday series.
All of the facts were not available for the program so they may be included in a voice over at the end of the program. These facts will raise a lot of eyebrows and they will silence a lot of the commentary on these threads.
Here are some facts that the readers of these threads may not be aware of: Very shortly after the incident Airbus Industrie published an AD outlining the changes to the pilots manual governing management of fuel leakage. In the first page of the AD Airbus said it was the pilots fault. I have been involved in the aviation industry since 1949 and I have never seen an AD that assigned blame. The AD went into every conceivable scenario relative to the management of a major fuel leak.
And just about everyone required the physical observation of the leak to ascertain where the leak was located which in turn would generate the counter effort by the pilot(s). This involved the flight crew or cabin crew making the observation. No consideration was given to the fact that if the leak occurred at night the observation could not be made. This is what happened on the Air Transat A330. Even if the information in the AD were available at the time the pilots could not respond correctly because it happened in the dark of night. Nothing was mentioned in the AD about the fact that the A 330 system provides a warning well into the leak as opposed the 757 which requires a very small differential in order to generate a warning.
The AD was a cover your ass effort and it was not very well thought out.
Here is another fact. An AD was issued to cover abrasion of lines on P&W and GE engines used on the A-330, which would result in loss of fuel. This AD was issued long before the Air Transat incident, which means that both Airbus Industrie and Rolls Royce, were well aware of the potential for the problem to manifest itself on the Trent-700. There is more and hopefully it will be covered in the Mayday program. If it isn’t, I will publish it on these threads.
