Meat Plow wrote in message
...
On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:51:14 +0100, Mike wrote:

On Thu, 28 May 2009 01:52:41 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
wrote:

So do I, my friend, as I am about to get on one for the first time in
October. All of my previous cross-pond jaunts have been in properly
built
747s, which have a proper yoke for the driver to hang on to, and
'automatics' that can be switched off.

Boeings have always had issues with their design. 737 rudder
hydraulics for example were a death trap waiting to happen and some
****wits let them keep flying despite a serious design issue being
known about for 15 years... and as for the 747, we have fuel tanks
that explode, engines that fall off, lightning strikes that make the
wing fall off to name but a few.

The 737 issue was with the rudder screw. An engine that fell from I
think an AA DC10 was caused by a pylon fitting that was damaged by
a engine refit. Flight 800 fuel tank exploded under extraordinary
conditions and was corrected. As far as lightning taking out a wing,
what flight was that?

Walk around a Boeing assembly plant, or previously an MD plant and you
see workers in casual street clothes, keys hanging off their
waistband, loose items in their pockets. Walk around an Airbus plant
and you see workers in specific work clothes with *no* pockets, with
tight control on personnel access and all losses of hardware being
fully investigated. At Boeing you get birds nesting in the structures
and people eating food, people dropping small items and just picking
another one from a parts bin with no regard for where the stray bits
end up. Look at the number of foreign objects found in nooks and
crannies on Boeing aircraft during their maintenance stripdowns - a
full size sweeping brush FFS! numerous coins, numerous spare
fasteners, a mouldy sandwich, even huge ring binders stuffed with 'QA
documentation'

Didn't an Airbus 310's rudder rip completely off the fuselage a few
years ago. Boeing has been making some pretty reliable military and
civilian aircraft for 60 years. Airbus?

There's something fundamentally wrong
about a plane that has to be flown with a left-handed joystick,

Then sit in the other seat with a right handed joystick.

and which employs a robot driver hidden away somewhere,
which believes it knows more
about how to fly a plane, than the human guy and his chum in the
co-seat,
who have 40 years flying experience between them ... :-\

The robot driver *usually* *does* know more, but not always.

All newer military aircraft depend entirely upon a 'robot' to fly
them. A human can't respond fast enough to fly an aircraft
purposefully designed to be aerodynamically unstable like the
F/A 117, F16, YF 22, F 18/e.


Surely they've reached the 21 century and don't rely on pitot tubes alone.
Surely X,Y,Z GPS with over-the-land interpolated speed which should agree
with the pitot figures when wind speed taken is taken into account.