Australians Simulate Airbus 380 Near Disaster - by Christine Negroni

Last fall, shortly before Qantas Flight 32 gave a hairy, scary ride to 446 people on the Airbus A380,  I was invited to tour the Airbus Training Center in Miami, Florida, given a detailed tutorial on the Airbus design and safety philosophy and just for fun -- allowed to pilot the A340 simulator.

These high-tech simulators can be programmed to fly any flight when the data has been captured, so we flew USAirways Flight 1549, better known now as the miracle on the Hudson" This was, at the time, the most famous example in aviation of turning chicken s**t into chicken salad.

This shows how important the design was to the successful water landing of the A320 after geese disabled both of the airliner's engines. But the point is that the opportunity to analyze and re-analyze the flight through simulators is beneficial, hindsight being 20/20 and all that.

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