A group of pilots criticized the safety of the Airbus A300-600 after last November's crash of a Santo Domingo-bound plane out of New York, Vanity Fair reports in its September issue.
The crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in New York's Rockaway district, one minute and 26 seconds after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport, shocked New Yorkers, coming as it did two months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The crash investigation "has literally shaken the foundations upon which we define what is, or is not, safe," the pilots said in a letter to National Transportation Safety Board chair Marion Blakey and Federal Aviation Administration chief Jane Garvey.
All 260 passengers and crew members were killed, along with five people on the ground when the vertical tail fin snapped off.
But as to what caused the crash is still up for debate, according to the New York general interest and fashion magazine.
The magazine cites a letter by eight American Airlines pilots who insist that the US authority's theory of pilot error in the crash is fundamentally flawed.
The Airbus was still climbing after takeoff when it passed through the wake turbulence of a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 that had taken off ahead of it. The plane veered sharply before the tail section separated completely from the plane.
A National Transportation Safety Board statement said an overreaction to the turbulence by Flight 587 pilots "could cause a potentially catastrophic failure of an airliner's vertical tail fin."
That's implausible, according to the pilots.
Such a reaction would have been out of keeping with strict training criteria received by pilots, the group told the magazine.
In fact, they have "logged a lengthy dossier of other incidents in which Airbus planes have flown out of control -- not through pilot error, they say, but through malfunctions in their computerized control systems, which are the most advanced in the industry."
One of them includes a report of an incident in June 2000 in which a pilot after takeoff on a transatlantic flight reported "an input on the rudder" of a plane, possibly due to wake vortex, with such severe a severe impact and lurching, he returned the A300-600 to London Heathrow.
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