Airbus vs Boeing -- Airbus wins, any day

[legoboyvdlp]

In the USA Tour today, JWOCKY, I and others briefly discussed Airbus vs Boeing.
I'm an Airbus kind of guy, as someone said.
Now, yes, I flew the 777.
But.
Airbuses are the best.
You know why?
If you stall in a 727, good luck. Same with a 737. Maybe you will survive in a 777 - if your copilot is not pushing the yoke full back to kill everyone.
In any plane, a DEEP STALL will likely kill you. But the A320 (tries) to ensure it will not happen to you.

Direct Law:ALL protections are lost.
In Direct Law, autopilot function is always lost. DIR is entered if there is failure of all three inertial reference units or all three primary flight computers, faults in both elevators or flame out of both engines concurrent with loss of PRIM 1

So, how hard is it to get into DIR law?!
Plus, it has a table and sidestick, is roomy...
Auto checklist memos...
I could go on.
Begin the machine guns

[jwocky]

Well, I am a Boeing guy. Mostly admittedly from flying as passenger in them both ... a lot ... too much ... and from looking into incident reports. The Boeings in general have a calmer flight, even if the weather is sub optimal. There are too many incidents in which pilots didn't react because they relied to much on the Airbus computer systems, but as Asiana proved, now that happens also more with Boeing. The materials used in Airbus in the urge to be always bleeding edge are in high stress situations not tested enough. There was an A330 once losing it's tail in a jet wash. Aside of that, planes crossing areas with thunderstorms were once safe because they established a Faraday cage. Not so anymore with Airbus, the cage is broken by a lot of carbon fibre now. Which means, the commercial planes most heavily relying on electronic systems endanger at the same time the integrity of the very same systems by weakening the protection against lightning strike. So in the summary, well, it's the old question of bleeding edge development against tested and matured systems. Which by the way backfired a little at Boeing as well with the Dreamliner.

Oh, and talking about joysticks ... humm, you are aware, the joystick is left of the pilot? Statistically 88% of the population are right-handed, which means you have 88% of all pilots flying those things with their less trained, less controlled hand. Just saying.

J.

[legoboyvdlp]

Yes, but the copilot (first officer) can use his right hand, and (at least BAW) wants Captains, so obviously they give them priority in PF-NF
To give them more hours/experience.
Of course, captains fly manually too.
I see your point (as curtis forum failed to do on other subjects)

[HOM001]

Boeing is from 'Murica. That's enough for me.
[/most_common_argument]

Admittedly, I've flown on much more Boeings than Airbuses, (only flew on Airbuses thrice, twice in a A320, and once in an A330. Unfortunately, two of those flights were USAirways so there was nothing good about them, and the other was United so not much better)
But, in that lazy way of just looking at aircraft, I think
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... staedt.jpg
Looks better than
http://www.aircraftrecognition.co.uk/im ... 21-200.jpg
And
http://www.qatarisbooming.com/wp-conten ... 40x480.jpg
Looks better than
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes ... 3/a350.jpg

[legoboyvdlp]

787 better than A350? Don't you love the '50s wingtips?
And yeah, I think the 767 looks like a fat whale. The 757 looks odd. The 737-100-600 look pretty bad. My opinion.

[KIWI34]

For me i would have to say Boeing. I think the phrase " if it aint Boeing i aint going" is sh*t because Airbus also has advanced and nice aircraft. I think its more of a preference thing, but i really do love the 777 and 787, those things are amazing. If i plan to join the RNZAF in the years to come i would choose to be posted into the squadron that flies the 757-VIP jets, so i guess i gotta start learning how to use the 75 now. As for in FG, I use the a330-200 on short hauls and island hoppping due to the technologically advanced systems it has ( yep its pretty good at it ), while the 777/787 make up my long haul choice

[KL-666]

Going for looks is so superficial. I go for the mind The way Airbus interferes with pilot inputs via their computers, i consider dangerous. Normal law creates "lazy" pilots, that do not have to consider anything, like the possibility they can stall. In case of an emergency, and they get into a lesser law, they can not rely on their well trained automatic reactions of normal law. Then i prefer Boeing who keeps normal flying very close to emergency flying.

Something else that does not give me much confidence in the logic of Airbus, is their implementation of the dual stick input. Steering should be unambiguous. So coupled sticks are good, or one stick has 100% input at any time is good. But what did the programmers of airbus do? They make an addition of both inputs. So if one pushes and the other pulls, nothing happens. This is logic of a programmer, not of someone that has knowledge of functional design. I only see apprentice programmers make such mistakes, and have to correct them.

Imagine you steer your car into a corner and nothing happens, because something is taking opposite action. We would never accept such logic, but we happily board a plane that functions like that.

Kind regards, Vincent

[jwocky]

Lets talk numbers:

A330 - 17 incidents plus 2 hijackings (which obviously can't count as technical problems). Those 17 incidents include 8 hull losses. There are aboutish 1250 A330 in service

A340 - There have been 5 incidents with hull loss, none with fatalities. Aboutish 380 of them are in service.

A350 - No incidents, but then there are only 5 of them in service yet

A380 - was 1 time involved in an incident, but that was an uncontained engine failure with dropping debris over Indonesia and subconsequent problems in other systems. Still not bad for almost 170 in service.

737 - 357 (including 111 hijackings) incidents and accidents on the book, but them 8675 of them have been delivered.

747 - 131 incidents and accidents (60 hull losses), including planes shot down by Russian fighter jets, hijacked and bombed out of the sky by terrorists. One incident involving a 747 is a Japanese (JAL fligh) in which the 747 had no problems, but the following A330 got in the jet wash and lost it's tail inturbulence. But then, there are 1512 747s of the various models delivered in total.

757 - 28 incidents and accidents with 8 hull losses. 11 of these incidents were hijackings. Of the remaining 17, two of the losses in a midair collision involved ATC errors because the ATC led the planes accidentally into each other. Some of the 757s involved in accidents were operated in some of the rather weird areas of the world and attributed to bad maintenance. And two more accidents involving 757s were actually crashes of little private planes taking off too short after the 757s and got hit by jet wash. 1049 757s have been delivered.

767- involved in 44 incidents and accidents. 15 hull losses. Only six of them caused fatalities and three of those were actually hijackings and one was pilot suicide. 1080 757s were delivered.

777 - The Triple-7 was involved in 14 aviation accidents including six hull losses. Three incidents were hijackings, Before MH370, the only fatality recorded in connection with a 777 was a ground worker who managed somehow to shower himself in kerosene while fueling up a 777. Then of course, came the disappearance of MH370, Air Asiana and the missile attack on MH17. A total of 1330 777s have been delivered as of September 1st.

787 - The Dreamliner has become the Nightmare liner for Boeing. Problems with the new batteries caused fires, there were fuel leaks, a beacon was unreliable as it sounds. However, there has not one case yet serious enough to cause an incident report as far as I can find (the other new kid on the block, the A380 came already in in Australia with an engine out and half a dozen systems damaged in consequence). However, 320 of them are delivered, which is significant higher a number than for the A350 yet.

So yes, that is not enough and not precise enough for a comprehensive examination, but it appears, that Airbus is hinging behind in accidents/delivered planes. In the four engine department for example:

A340: 5 hull losses /380 planes
747: 60 hull losses / 1512 planes

So at first, this looks bad for the Boeing, right? But then, 42 of the hull losses of the 747 were blamed on terrorists (for example Lockerbie), attacks by military aircraft (Korean Airline 007), ATC errors (one led a 747 in the mountainside outside of Madrid for example) and so on. So this leaves 18 real plane related hull losses. And to make it comparable, we recalculate the numbers both to per 100 units delivered and we get

1.31 planes lost/100 deliveries for the A340
1.19 planes lost/100 deliveries for the 747
however, there was no hull loss with an A380 yet because it's so new. We will see what comes in the future.

The picture is the same in the two engine field. Due to the high numbers delivered of some models and the long time they are already in service, Boeing seems to ramp up high numbers of plane losses, but when you look at the details, there are a lot of terrorist incidents counted in the FAA statistics. 111 for the 737s for example. If you subtract those, nothing can for example beat the statistics of the 777 because a lot of them are in service and all fatal incidents are either attacks, stupidity on ground that wasn't plane related or the still unsolved disappearance of MH370 and the Air Aisana crash. Not bad considering, there are 1330 delivered and every day, more then 1000 of them take off somewhere in the world. In the Airbus fleet, only the A330 can compete with that by numbers delivered and we know about some of those incidents as well (AF446 for example).
So, as far as safety records go, Boeing seems still to be way ahead. But as I said, this is not comprehensive and to do a comprehensive statistics would be a major work for which I lack the time right now.

J.

[HJ1an]

I think of it in this analogue (although it isn't completely similar);

Airbus = Google Car

One of Google's lead project guy was recorded as saying his kids will soon reach an age where they get their driving license in about 3 years. His goal? To ensure it does NOT happen. He wants automated cars before his kids could drive, effectively taking away one of a teenager's anticipated form of pride - to drive - away. Also, they removed the steering wheel from their cars. Basically, they want a car that drive itself while the passenger take a nap or something (something can already be done in bus or train) :/ IMO, they should test their self driving cars in places like Bangkok, or Jakarta, in all conditions (wet, hot, etc)

Boeing = Tesla

Even though Tesla has tried to make a self-driving car as well, the major difference here is that their autopilot (at least beta form) is more suitable for highway use, so it frees the pilot a.k.a driver from other stresses such as keeping in speed limit, etc. but it still requires the driver to be wary of surroundings and be responsidble AS THEY SHOULD BE. The driver still has to drive the smaller roads where situation are always more unpredictable up until the highway.

So, back to planes, that's how I think it is. Of course, Airbus still needs some pilot input probably because the tech level isn't there yet, but seems like that's their goal.

OTOH, I think Boeing should do something about the times when a pilot DOES screw up, and human beings are just prone to distractions, emotions, etc. So in the end there needs to be a balance. Just like in cars nowadays the steering automatically stays in lane if the driver is unresponsive, there should be something like that.

[KL-666]

Good analogy Hj1an, that is how i think airbus and boeing are positioning themselves.

Kind regards, Vincent