Quote:
Originally Posted by mako88sb
There was a Mayday episode about the faulty rudder power control unit that was very sporadic and very difficult to duplicate in the testing facility. It wasn't until they cooled the pcu to -40 F and thermal shocked it with fairly hot hydraulic fluid that they were able to isolate the problem. It was corrected throughout the entire 737 fleet which at that time was thousands of planes. Anyway, the safety statistics for the 737 show it to be a very safe aircraft. Most of the incidents on your link have nothing to do with it's design.
http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm |
The design of the 737 as you said was sound. It is in wide use, worldwide. The NTSB was slow however with it's finding and rectification of the problems. The identification of the issue as you described was also in the links I listed.
Flight 585 went down march 3, 1991 and flight 427 in September 8, 1994. The crashes in both cases resulted from defective servo controls for the rudders. The crash of flight 427 and the tragic loss of 132 people might have been avoided had the seriousness of the situation been recognized as an inherent problem with the servo and not an anomaly.
I have flown many times on the 737 and liked the aircraft however, my plane didn't go down either.