Virgin ATR grounded in Albury
 

Interesting article by Ben Sandilands on Crikey:


Virgin Australia's leg breaker flight under double inquiry | Plane Talking


Anyone know what the story is?

padlock please
 

I don't think that it is advantageous to run two threads on this. Let's stick with http://www.pprune.org/australia-new-...akes-vara.html

Story I heard on the ground at Albury is that the tail of the aircaft was badly bent in the encounter with turbulence.

My sources have told me that yes indeed the damage is much worse than was first thought. Of concern is how the aircraft could operate all those sectors post incident, without any damage detected?
The investigation by the ATSB and the actions of CASA yet again point to a pair of organisations that simply refuse to act in a transparent manner, but instead scramble to protect the 'big end of town'. This incident has the potential to turn into yet another complete clusterf#ck to add to the ATSB and CASA history pages. They just don't get it do they?

VARA certainly aren't the big end of town and have been on shaky terms with our Canberra overlords for sometime now.

Not too sure what CASA could come out and immediately do - personally a bit of the ol' Tiger treatment would have been good to see, just to show that CASA weren't bullying Tiger a few years ago and they are trying to be consistent... But you're probably right, that big red virgin on the fin makes those decisions very hard to make.

"CASA weren't bullying Tiger a few years ago"
Of course they were!!!

You are right, the Virgin tail gets them across the line. No doubt people at CASA also have some association at Virgin.

If the tail was striped it would have been grounded quite some time ago...

And I thought Tiger were trying to bully some terrain... With an A320.

Is there any photos?

E_A, yes mate, there are some photos. However they are under lock and key due to the sensitivity of the subject. Doing my best to source one or two, if I succeed I will post them.

004 (welcome back BTW) you might need to have a chat to Para377 who also seems to have sources about the extent of the damage.:ok:

Lookyloo, thanks for the warm welcome :ok: I missed you also. I would say para377 has a different source to myself, perhaps you can make your own contact, I'm not overly interested, but thanks anyway.

How are CASA and the ATSB hiding things? I didn't realise they were the ones obligated to tell the press every time there was an accident or incident? Once the report is finalised, yes, but not during the initial investigation. I'd say they are probably doing their job properly behind the scenes - just because you, the pruner, doesn't know about it doesn't mean it's being handled poorly.

Which organisation handles the ATR's engineering in SYD?

Cheers for the possible photo post.

It wasn't turbulence....

In this day and age, why is more info not forthcoming? The apparent secrecy surrounding these circumstances only serves to encourage discussion of a cover up. Methinks somebody porked it up, big time!

^^^One needs to be careful in this day and age. Comments on public forums could get you the sack. I too, have seen photos and it is not pretty.

This article has a photo of the aircraft in the hangar, but taken some distance away.

http://transform.fairfaxregional.com...h678_fcrop.jpg

No leading edge on the horizontal in the pic...:eek:

i dare say that would have been removed for inspection purposes TBM.....

The issue here is very much who did the post- overstress inspection and why wasnt the tail damage picked up then.