Sent to me from Gaston Bernal, "These are pictures of the wreck of a brand new A340-600 in November 2007, that had never flown. (never saw (1) hour in the air) Thank these French and their Arab friends for this bit of “comedy of errors”. Nine employees of the Arab airline were in the aircraft, but “no employees” from Airbus were present. (It seems in truth that two Airbus techs were onboard)
The Arab crew taxied out to the run-up area. (In truth there were no Etihad airline crew member aboard)Then they took all four engines to takeoff power with virtually an empty aircraft. (They obvious didn’t read the run-up manuals.) No chocks were set, (not that it would have mattered at that power setting) . Brakes will not hold it back at full power anyway.
As it turns out the takeoff warning horn was blaring away in the cockpit because they had all FOUR engines at full power. The aircraft computers thought they were trying to takeoff but it had not been configured properly (flaps/slats, etc, etc).
Then one of these brain surgeons decided to pull the “Ground Sense” circuit breaker to quiet the alarms. This fools the aircraft into thinking it is in the air.
“A big,big mistake”!
As soon as they did that , the computers automaticlly “released” all the brakes. (“this is a Safety feature so that pilots don’t land with the brakes on”.)
There was No time to stop and no one smart enough thought to reduce the max power setting…
So the rest is as you see i! t below. No one is talking, so who knows if there were survivors."
Thanks Yard for getting to the one meaningful term, stupid. And as for the previous; certainly slamming the French in things avion like is really unfair and uninformed. They’ve been pioneers and successful designers in every way, just one example is Marcel Bloch/ Dassault.
As for arabs in airplanes, maybe it is’nt their thing. A close relative of mine investigated a really horrible incident where a SaudAir I think it was a Tri-Star landed and burned with total loss of life, several hundred, so this isn’t a funny story. It turned out that there was a cabin fire which was so violent that the crew crash landed, but had not depressurized the cabin, so had to wait on the ground for that to occur, by which time it was too late. Turned out that a group had tried to roast a goat over a fire by the aft gallies.
This was a routine test gone bad. Even now, no one has figured out why this happened, and there were no employees of the airline on board. The contents of the email are wrong, inflammatory, and border on being racist.
I looked up the Saudi accident. Funny, it doesn’t say anything about anyone roasting a goat. (Which is absolutely ludicrous!!!) No modern flight crew of any nationality would allow such a stupid thing to happen.
They used to tell us students at Spartan college of aeronautics, in Tulsa OK. that Arabs were “dumb as rocks”, but I wonder if they were talking about the bin Laden group
Obviously, the intellect of some Arabs might leave much to be desired, which stems from their collective laziness, beeing oil rich.
No, gator, I feel the same way as you about racism, but… you’ll notice that the accident report agrees in every way with what I was told and related, only that the cause of the fire was “undetermined”. I stand by my story, considering my source, however I will concede that I have no idea who the passengers were, they could have been a bunch of Floridian tourists for all I know. Actually I was told they were pilgrims to Mecca, for which Jedda airport in 1980 would be the destination. Which then means they were Muslims, but of what ethnicity I have no clue and apologize for the generalization.
BTW I’ve asked my source abt this one and I’ll let you know what I find out. I like the A340- in 2005/ 2006 I went to Lima every month from SFO while designing the airport there and its a straight south shot, only 3 or 4 hours time change after 7/8 hours in the air. Big comfortable Airbus, individual videos in coach etc. LAN Chile.
"A brand new A340-600 aircraft in was badly damaged when it ran through a blast barrier at the Airbus Saint-Martin facility at Toulouse, France. There were no fatalities, but five people were injured. The accident happened late on the afternoon of November 15, 2007.
The aircraft, which was painted in Etihad Airways livery, was undergoing pre-delivery tests on the ground at the Airbus facility at the time of the accident. According to anews release issued todayby Airbus, engine-run-ups were being carried out on the A340-600, MSN 856, which was due to be delivered to Etihad in just a few days.
At the time of the accident, there were nine people on board the aircraft, including two Airbus staff, and seven employees of Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies (ADAT). Five of those nine people were injured, but as of today only the two Airbus employees and one ADAT employee remained hospitalized. None of their injuries are reported to be life-threatening.
So that’s what 4 CFM56-7B’s propelling a plane into a concrete wall looks like. I hope they were able to salvage the engines, but if so, they’d be sold as spares.
This is true but the flight crew’s eyes can’t be everywhere at once. I live and work in a small Asian country and I have personally seen a couple of old ladies attempt to light a small kerosene burner to cook some rice on an international flight. Thankfully, a flight attendant put a stop to it before anything happened. The poor old dears had obviously never flown before and clearly didn’t know they would be given an inflight meal. This happened a few years ago before those ridiculously paranoic rules about fluids were introduced.
But it shows that cultural differences inevitably result in a different level of understanding of technology, procedures, etc and we shouldn’t take our knowledge of such subjects for granted; what’s normal for us westerners may be a world away for a different culture. Criticism is therefore not warranted. Exercising some understanding is a more humane response.
