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nostupidquestions·No Stupid Questionsbycbthunderhead

An Airbus A320 Neo recently lost all 3 hydraulic systems at the exact same time while in cruise. They are supposed to be redundant. How come Airbus hasn't grounded the A320 Neo?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_2379

The cascade of fault warnings as recorded by the digital flight data recorder, all of which occurred within a minute,[4] involved the three multiply redundant hydraulic systems, elevator flight-controls, autopilot disconnection, an emergency exit door, and even an engine anti-ice warning.[5] The Airbus A320 has three independent hydraulic systems, coded blue, green, and yellow, such that the loss of all three is considered by experts to be virtually impossible. (Too, this aircraft make and model is the one of the most flown globally.)[6] For approximately four seconds all hydraulics control was actually lost.[7][8]

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17 replies

lemmy.world

It wasn't in cruise. It was in a -1G manoeuvre as part of stall recovery, and recovered the systems within 4s. Definitely not a normal flight.

12
lemmy.ca

If they know exactly why it happened and the probability of it happening again is within tolerance, there’s no reason to ground the entire fleet.

29
seathrureply
quokk.au

"Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.?

18

A “normal accident” is an emergent disaster, arising from a complex and highly technical system whose components are tightly coupled, meaning that the state of one component significantly affects others. Perrow wrote that in simple mechanical systems, a high degree of reliability can be achieved through the use of independent and redundant components, but as system complexity increases, especially when human organizations are involved, true redundancy among the components ceases to exist, and failures or errors may trigger a “cascade” that propagates through the system until disaster occurs. Cascades are, by their very nature, difficult or impossible to fully predict until they occur.

  • Admiral Cloudberg paraphrasing Charles Perrows 1984 book 'Normal Accidents'
5

Hey, you were told in no uncertain terms, first rule is we do not talk about recalls.

5
lemmy.zip

Right, this is obviously a terrible thing to happen, there is no denying that.

But we the public have too little information about the aircraft to demand any change yet.

They may already have identified the cause, and have found it to only affect a small percentage of the A320neo fleet, with a relatively simple fix, that is easy enough to install that it doesn't notably impact scheduling.

We don't know, and at this point we need to trust the investigators

13
sh.itjust.works

> at this point we just need to trust the investigators

hat's just it, I don't know we should trust any US federal regulators at this point, especially not when there's a lot of money at stake.

nd we already had the global aviation community bitching about the last time a US planes computer bug crashed a plane into a mountain and the FAA was dragging its feet.

-3

Hehe, it's fine, I have done similar things

3

From Wikipedia:

The chief pilot later tested positive twice for THC.

I don't think it's related, as they seem to have reacted correctly, but interesting to know.

6

You reached the end