Word: airbus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...French nuclear submarine arrived off the coast of Brazil to join the effort to locate the black box from Air France Flight 447 on Thursday, aviation experts stressed the necessity of recovering those cockpit recorders in order to learn what exactly brought down the Airbus A330 and the 228 people on board. In past inquiries into airline disasters, investigators have been able to figure out the cause by piecing together clues from the wreckage itself, sometimes without information from the black box. But after 10 days of searching, the authorities combing what's believed to be Flight 447's crash...
...Wednesday, TIME revisited an October 2008 incident in which a Qantas Airbus 330 - the same model as AF447 - unexpectedly went into a brief yet harrowing 20-second nosedive, causing multiple injuries and requiring an emergency landing. The investigation that followed blamed an ADIRU failure for the 330's uncommanded dive: one of the plane's three ADIRUs, which are designed to help the plane's flight-control computer fly the plane safely, began sending erroneous data spikes to the flight-control computer. Instead of deferring to the information of the two functioning ADIRUs as it normally should, the computer acted...
...According to Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon, any comparisons between the Qantas and Air France flights are fundamentally misleading. "One thing that has got to be clear is that there are more than one manufacturer of ADIRUs, and the ADIRU manufacturer for the Qantas case is not the same for the Air France case," he tells TIME. As reported in the aviation trade magazine Air Transport News, manufacturer Northrop Grumman makes the ADIRUs for Qantas, and Honeywell for Air France. "There are no similarities in ADIRUs between the two cases," says Dubon. (Q&A: How to survive a plane crash...
...Qantas 330s and the rest of the Airbus 330 fleet, Dubon says they will continue to fly with their same ADIRUs until directed otherwise by investigative authorities. "The [Qantas] investigation is still ongoing, and we're still involved in giving technical assistance to that, but no final recommendations have been made," he says. "And obviously, when the investigators do, then we will act on those...
...Airbus 330 is not the only model to suffer ADIRU failures. An Airworthiness Directive issued by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration last year warned airlines of instances of failure in ADIRUs aboard Airbus 319, 320 and 321 models that "could result in loss of one source of critical altitude and airspeed data and reduce the ability of the flight crew to control the airplane." Dubon says these issues are "totally unrelated ... Our safety people have informed me that is not relevant to either the Qantas case or the Air France case...