Quote:
Originally Posted by Tchocky
Maintained properly, an aircraft will last it's design life and mabe beyond. Look at the RAF VC10 and Tristar fleet, which work very hard indeed. The 727 you saw may not have had future owners/operators in the pipeline and so was not up to scratch. The paint job doesn't tell you much, I guess in Russia the paint is a lower priority due to the severe winter weather - a/c paint hates hail.
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It was donated to my University by fed ex. The reason i mentioned to paint is because it was eaten away by all the fuel and Skydrol she was leaking. Even if air frames are maintained to the most they can possibly be, there still is an inverse bell curve of incidents that occurs at the beginning of an aircraft's life to the end. I'm sure these older russian air frames are beginning to come to the end, where accidents are more likely, especially when these Russian air carriers are dealing with older aircraft and smaller budgets. What you say about the old Tristars being in good shape may be true...but I'm positive they spend a lot of maintenance costs for those aircraft.