Word: airbus
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...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...
...never know what it was like to be aboard Air France Flight 447 as it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31, apparently killing all 228 aboard. For now, the closest we may get is listening to the passengers on a similar Airbus 330 jet whose flight computer put it into an uncommanded dive over northwestern Australia last October...
...preliminary investigative report, released on March 6, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said Airbus had initially said it didn't know of any other similar events. But when the same thing happened again, involving a different aircraft, on Dec. 27, Airbus combed its computerized flight files and found data fingerprints suggesting similar ADIRU problems had occurred on a total of four flights. One of the earlier instances, in fact, included a September 2006 event on the same plane that entered the uncommanded dive in October (the other three flights had continued safely on). The same VCR-sized ADIRU...
...Australians' March report concluded that the October dive was due to a series of events that, when combined, was "close to the worst possible scenario that could arise from the design limitation in the AOA processing algorithm." Airbus also told investigators that this particular mathematical formula for flying the plane is found only on its A330 and A340 models. "Different algorithms were in use on other Airbus types, which were reported to be more robust to AOA spikes," the report said. "The manufacturer advised that AOA spikes matching the above scenario would not have caused a pitch-down event...
...Airbus 330 is a top-of-the-line aircraft, says Learmount, and one of the safest in the world. "We're talking about the aviation equivalent of the modern, expensive, very sophisticated car," he says. "It just never goes wrong, and if it does, it self-diagnoses and sends messages back to base." But despite all these technological advances, progress can still be made in dealing with fire detection, he says. "[Since the Swissair flight] there were loads of people in the industry saying it is just not acceptable to have modern airplanes being churned out with the most amazing...