The International Cessna^® 170 Association

futr_alaskaflyer,
I have found that the most durable rudder pedals are the late cast plastic ones. They bolt, or fit, right on without any modification and never seem to show any wear where they provide a bearing surface for rotational brake linkage. The cast aluminum ones seem to show the most wear.

BL-
I don't know about anyone else but I don't want plastic rudder pedals. Plastic is more prone to failure than aluminum and if the aluminum pedals show some wear, so what? They aren't going to crumble up. Sand blasting the rudder pedals brings them back to almost new looking.

Richard P.,
In regard to your apparent lack of faith in "Platics", use caution when you next buy an airline ticket. It may be on a B-787 !

I know, sometimes you don't have a choice. I cringe every time I step on an Airbus and hope the odds are in my favor that day. Shake them real hard and they fall apart! I don't travel enough on the big planes to worry about 787s too much. Alaska Airlines hasn't gone to plastic yet. I have my fingers crossed.

When I have a choice it won't be plastic.

hilltop170 wrote:I know, sometimes you don't have a choice. I cringe every time I step on an Airbus ...When I have a choice it won't be plastic.

AMEN, Richard!
I won't allow myself OR any of my family members to ride Airbus! That is a serious position I maintain.
Just last month a friend I occasionally contract-pilot with had his wife call me for a recommendation on which flight to take to Italy. The Airbus-operator was $420 cheaper each way, and I told her to get on the more expensive Boeing (not 787.)
I explained why, and she did the Boeing. Had a nice, safe round-trip.

My daughter, Nancy, has been flying the airbus airplanes for FedEx over in Asia since they opened their hub in Subic Bay in the Phillippines back in about '95 or '96. I've always wished she was flying something else. I lost all confidence in them since the AA fiasco in NY. And even after that, I believe AA had another one that suffered turbulence damage to the plastic vertical stabilizer coming in to Miami from So. America that went undiscovered, while it was in regular service, for a year or so and then was a multi million dollar repair job.

blueldr wrote:My daughter, Nancy, has been flying the airbus airplanes for FedEx over in Asia since they opened their hub in Subic Bay in the Phillippines back in about '95 or '96. I've always wished she was flying something else. I lost all confidence in them since the AA fiasco in NY. And even after that, I believe AA had another one that suffered turbulence damage to the plastic vertical stabilizer coming in to Miami from So. America that went undiscovered, while it was in regular service, for a year or so and then was a multi million dollar repair job.

Yep. and then there's Air France 447. ("alternate law"....RIGHT!)

Have you seen the animated-video-reconstructed from FD recorder of the Russian-operated Airbus that did three hammerheads during approach to Moscow, while the crew tried everything they could to regain control? It was shown to us I.P's at work last year during our own recurrency. I think we were told that over 6-Gs were recorded. Amazing it even held together.
There are reportedly numerous other "variances" that Airbus has suppressed from the public. It's an airplane envisioned to make piloting skills unnecessary, (and therefore pilot salaries low) and I suspect that is why pilots can find themselves in situations where the airplane simply ignores pilot inputs.
When I flew for British Aerospace (builders of some Airbus components) we were shown the video of the first crash at an airshow in France. The airplane fails to make it's pre-programmed missed-approach climb and continues to settle into the trees! The Captain was blamed and served time in prison despite the proofs offered that the black boxes had been tampered with during their possession by Airbus to alter the data used to convict the crew. (The engines failed to spool up (substantiated by Engineering Bulletins) and the fly-by-wire refused to pitch up (also substantiated by Eng. Bulletins), but instead commanded nose-down into the trees. He appealed, but had to serve the time while awaiting appeal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEH7OpnA-I4

Yeah. I want to ride in one.

NOT!

gahorn wrote:

hilltop170 wrote:I know, sometimes you don't have a choice. I cringe every time I step on an Airbus ...When I have a choice it won't be plastic.

AMEN, Richard!
I won't allow myself OR any of my family members to ride Airbus! That is a serious position I maintain.
Just last month a friend I occasionally contract-pilot with had his wife call me for a recommendation on which flight to take to Italy. The Airbus-operator was $420 cheaper each way, and I told her to get on the more expensive Boeing (not 787.)
I explained why, and she did the Boeing. Had a nice, safe round-trip.

I'm amazed that you gentlemen, as rational as you seem, harbor these feelings. Richard, some time with Capt. Tom Bunn might be in order. George, did the Airbus she might have taken end up in a fireball? Sounds to me like you lost her $840. Please don't show her that according to this the A-340 is the safest jet flying so far. She would have been better served had you advising her to drive to the airport in a car with an NHTSA 5 star safety rating wearing a helmet and a Nomex suit as that was by far the most dangerous part of her trip. Let's not even talk about highway safety once she got to Italy. Perhaps advising her not to take the Airbus because flying a Boeing would help keep jobs in America or because the foreign carrier doesn't pay their pilots squat, or the pilot's flight schedule is onerous, etc. might be a valid reason but--if you look at the statistics--aircraft safety is not one of them.

Ciao,

n2582d wrote:... Perhaps advising her not to take the Airbus because flying a Boeing would help keep jobs in America or because the foreign carrier doesn't pay their pilots squat, or the pilot's flight schedule is onerous, etc. might be a valid reason but--if you look at the statistics--aircraft safety is not one of them.

Ciao,

What led you to think those weren't included reasons?

I suspect you must be a crewmember on an Airbus?

Asking a pilot how he feels about his current "ride" is like asking how he feels about his wife or girlfriend...while she stands next to him. I've seen MU-2 pilots actually praise that airplane! Would that cause me to take a ride in one? No!
The fact that Airbus occasionally completes a trip without making headlines is not sufficient reason for me to endorse anyone I care about to ride in one. I've got numerous friends, fine aviators whose judgement I trust, who fly that airplane and they each, either HATE ..or DISTRUST...the thing...sometimes both. My opinion on the subject remains the same.

ps: Is it safer to ride in a Boeing with a junior-birdman than in an Airbus with a senior captain?
I don't know. But I DO know that Airbus considers their airplane suitable for less-experienced pilots who've only been thru "ab initio" training....and that's another reason I'm more likely to find myself behind an experienced crew in a Boeing, an airplane which behaves according to "normal law".

On this subject, Fly by Wire, by William Langewiesche, is an interesting read. It's about the Hudson River ditching, and Airbus' computerization of the flight controls, which is supposed to protect the airplane and contents from inappropriate pilot inputs. One of his conclusions is that the automation does not result in any improvement of Airbus' safety record over Boeing's. I don't remember him saying much about plastic, though.

Fun that his father, Wolfgang Langewiesche, wrote the classic Stick and Rudder.

Gary, I looked at the link you posted referencing the "safest" airliners, and I must say that I found the statements misleading. They claim that 340 is the safest...and gave No. 2 to the Boeing Triple-7...completely overlooking the fact that there are HALF as many 340's as 777's in those statistics....hardly a good reason to give it the No.1 spot. Since the 777 has had only one accident despite twice the numbers of airframes..in which everyone survived...I'd rather ride the Boeing.
The next FOUR safest airliners in that link, are all....BOEING.... and the number of Boeings outnumber all models of Airbus by over 4-thousand!
On top of that, even the worst-record Boeing outnumbers the worst Airbus by more than 2-1/2 times, and they are over 15 years older than Airbus. Even the most-numerous model Airbus is beaten in safety-records by three different models of Boeing, many of them much older airplanes....not much comparison in my view.

(PS, just to needle you a bit in jest...I notice that the Capt. Bunn you recommended seems to have flown the DC-8, but mostly BOEINGs in his airline career.)

(I hope my comments are taken lightly.)

What's not to like......???

RED Boeing 747-8 First Takeoff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=en ... slKvtQe5UE

gahorn wrote:

hilltop170 wrote:I know, sometimes you don't have a choice. I cringe every time I step on an Airbus ...When I have a choice it won't be plastic.

AMEN, Richard!
I won't allow myself OR any of my family members to ride Airbus! That is a serious position I maintain.
Just last month a friend I occasionally contract-pilot with had his wife call me for a recommendation on which flight to take to Italy. The Airbus-operator was $420 cheaper each way, and I told her to get on the more expensive Boeing (not 787.)
I explained why, and she did the Boeing. Had a nice, safe round-trip.

George,

As an airline captain that has actually flown Boeing (747), Douglas (DC-8), Lockheed (L-1011), and Airbus (A-320) for several thousand hours each, I can assure you that they are all safe. I certainly have my favorite (L-1011) but they are all just machines that are equally intolerant of misuse or lack of operational knowledge.

I'm not a jet pilot, never flown one. But, if I did fly one, I would want full control of the airplane if I needed it, not just have a vote in the outcome.

In a revealing article The Telegraph published a critical difference between Airbus and Boeing fly-by-wire design philosophy. Boeing strives to retain the "traditional" semblance of aircraft control, while Airbus invents an entirely new concept unique to their own design department. The flight crew of AF 447 likely did not realize they were countermanding each other's control inputs:

"(In) a comparison of Airbus and Boeing flight controls; unlike the control yoke used on Boeing flight decks, the Airbus side stick controls give no sensory or tactile and little visual feedback to the second pilot. Ross reasoned this might have been a factor in the failure of Robert and Dubois to countermand the manual input by pilot Bonin that some independent analysts suspect proved fatal for the aircraft..."

"It seems surprising that Airbus has conceived a system preventing one pilot from easily assessing the actions of the colleague beside him. And yet that is how their latest generations of aircraft are designed. The reason is that, for the vast majority of the time, side sticks are superb. ... Boeing has always begged to differ, persisting with conventional controls on its fly-by-wire aircraft, including the new 787 Dreamliner, introduced into service this year. Boeing's cluttering and old-fashioned levers still have to be pushed and turned like the old mechanical ones, even though they only send electronic impulses to computers. They need to be held in place for a climb or a turn to be accomplished, which some pilots think is archaic and distracting. ... Whatever the cultural differences, there is a perceived safety issue, too. The American manufacturer was concerned about side sticks' lack of visual and physical feedback. Indeed, it is hard to believe AF447 would have fallen from the sky if it had been a Boeing. Had a traditional yoke been installed on Flight AF447, Robert would surely have realised that his junior colleague had the lever pulled back and mostly kept it there. When Dubois returned to the cockpit he would have seen that Bonin was pulling up the nose. ..."

I agree with Richard.... If I'm the PIC ...then I want final authority and controllability commensureate with my level of responsibility. To insist otherwise is to endorse the philosophy that the PIC was never necessary at all...in which case it begs the question, "why is he there?"