For U33, since an Air Transat (Canadian) flight ran out of fuel because of an error in refuelling & had to glide to a safe landing on the Canary Islands on its way from Canada to the U/K, I believe all flights to & from U/K must at all times not be more than 2 hours flying time from land, I may have this wrong & I am sure someone on here will correct me if I am. The last time I flew to and from the U/K we were flying over the tip of Greenland for quite awhile. Our present Government has changed the law on maintenance checks to a voluntary system & the opinion of the pilots is that this has created a situation of an accident waiting to happen. In investigations it is easy to blame the pilots when they are dead & cannot defend them selves. In the case of 737's they had lots of problems with the rudder for a long time and knew it but did not have a fix & had at least 3 major crashes where all aboard were killed & still they allowed them to carry on flying, a case of greed & profit over safety and governments not doing their job looking after their people. In the case of the Airbus I think you will find there is no direct link from the cockpit to the control surfaces, it is all done by computers but has as many as 5 separate systems on each control surface, if I am wrong please correct me but that is my understanding of it. Mick B.
Mick,
The Air Transat incident was caused by a fuel leak due to maintenance error on another system. I think the 'out of fuel' incident you're thinking of was an Air Canada aircraft that ran out of fuel at an altitude of 41,000 feet (12,500 m) ASL, about halfway through its flight from Montreal to Edmonton via Ottawa. The crew was able to glide the aircraft safely to an emergency landing at Gimli Industrial Park Airport, a former Royal Canadian Air Force base in Gimli, Manitoba.[.
It's called ETOPS, (short for
Ex
tended
OPeration
S), and applies to all aircraft of all nations with 2 engines. They are basically the amount of time an aircraft can be from an airport, (depending on rating), which means a twin engined aircraft with an ETOPS 120 rating can fly any route as long as it's no more than 120 minutes from an airfield. Certain engines have a higher rating - e.g. a RR RB211 might have a ETOPS 180 rating.
With reference to the 737 rudder, most airliners have multiple restrictions within the flight envelope that are known about - these are covered in the operating manual as a restriction to certain maneuvers - e.g. the A300 had a restriction on operating the rudder to full deflection above a certain speed, i.e. don't do it or you'll rip the vertical tail off, it didn't stop a American pilot who decided he knew better - end result, a big smoking hole in New York with several hundred fatalities
All Airbus except the early A300s and the A380 have a fly by wire control system with triple hydraulic actuators on each surface, (the aircraft have 3 hydraulic systems - usually 2 engine driven and 1 emergency system usually battery powered or driven by the RAT), the A380 is different in that it only has 2 hydraulic systems and twin actuators on each surface, which have their own 'backup system' and each surface is split into at least 2 sections giving much higher redundancy
Mark.