Special Investigation - The series of mysterious Airbus 330 accidents culminating in tragic loss of Air France Flight 447
Made by Airbus, the giant European company that emerged around the time of Concorde’s development, the twin-engine, wide-bodied A330 is less than five years old. Since 1993, Airbus has received more than 1,400 orders for this plane and its close sibling, the four-engine A340, and there are around 1,000 of them in the sky. Each A330 costs about euro 150 million. ‘From nose to tail, the A330 and A340 incorporate the latest advances in Airbus technology and innovation,’ the company’s website says, adding that they exhibit ‘the best take-off and landing performance in all conditions, as well as high-efficiency flight’. With its human-proof computer systems, it is the most technically advanced aircraft in the world. So why has the Airbus 330's gleaming new fleet been so dogged by technical problems... and disturbing evidence of flawed cabling been so comprehensively ignored?
Company sources insist that the ADIRUs aren’t to blame because QF72 and AF447 used different types. This argument fails to impress the families’ lawyer, Tardivat: ‘We’re looking at the failure of large parts of the system, and there’s no way something like this should happen simply because of a problem with the pitot tubes. We need to look at the software. Was it the same – or very similar – in both planes? So far, Airbus won’t tell us. If it was, the fact that there were different boxes on different planes is no more important than one person using an IBM, another a Dell PC.’ Chris Hounsfield, editor of Aerospace Testing International, points to another possible cause: ‘Airbus crew have told me that their pilots can rely too heavily on an “intelligent” aircraft’s flying ability, and should the “intelligent” systems fail, they may not have had enough simulator training to cope with a sudden “flip” to mechanical systems.’
However, Tardivat and Hounsfield agree that the ultimate problem may lie somewhere else entirely – with the 100-odd miles of insulated wire connecting everything from computers to seat-back televisions. Ed Block, an American air investigator, has long been trying to draw attention to the dangers of some wire types. It was he who found the evidence of the likely cause of the disaster on TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747 that blew up off Long Island in 1996, killing all 230 on board. He concluded the problem had been short circuits, or arcs, that ultimately led to sparking in the vapour-filled central fuel tank.
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