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Pilots' Airbus objections unfounded, American says

One of the engines from AA Flight 587 crashed into a gas station in Queens, New York.
One of the engines from AA Flight 587 crashed into a gas station in Queens, New York.  


FORT WORTH, Texas (CNN) -- American Airlines said Friday there is no reason for any of its pilots to demand the grounding of its Airbus A300 jetliners.

About a dozen pilots have sent an e-mail to all other A300 pilots in the airline, saying that the planes should be grounded "until a definitive cause for the crash of Flight 587 can be determined, along with ways to prevent a similar occurrence."

American Airlines Flight 587 crashed shortly after taking off from Kennedy Airport in New York on November12, killing all 260 people aboard and five on the ground. A large part of the plane's tail snapped off just before the crash. The cause remains unknown.

"Nothing in the examination of the Airbus fleet, or in the tests conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board, by American Airlines or by other Airbus operators suggests that there is a need to ground this fleet," the airline said in a statement. "Neither the manufacturer, nor other carriers that operate similar Airbus aircraft, have suggested any reason to ground this fleet."

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    The airline said more than 2,400 Airbus models that share the A300's tail design are being flown by more than 150 airlines around the world. It invited all pilots who signed the petition to come to American's Tulsa, Oklahoma, maintenance base "for special briefings by the technical experts who know the Airbus best."

    The e-mail sent to the airline's more than 400 Airbus pilots asked, "Are we completely comfortable putting our friends and family on an A-300? If the answer to that question is not a resounding yes, then logic would lead a well-trained pilot to conclude that no one else should be flying on them either."

    It asked their fellow pilots to sign and forward a message to the airline saying the airline's remaining 34 A300s should be grounded until all questions are answered and "a definitive test can be developed to truly check the structural integrity of the vertical stabilizers" of the plane.

    One of the protest organizers, who asked not to be named, said Thursday about 50 to 60 Airbus pilots at American had signed the request to ground the planes.

    The Allied Pilots Association, the union representing American's 11,500 pilots, did not join the call to ground the Airbus A300.

    "We are not advocating a grounding of the fleet," said union spokesman Gregg Overman, although he said of the pilots' protest, "Clearly we've got the same concerns."

    The tail fin on an Airbus is made out of what are called composites -- carbon fiber materials that are glued together to create a structure that is lighter than metal, but considered just as strong. It's the same principle as used in a sheet of plywood. Teams of airline personnel have been inspecting the Airbus tails visually. But an organizer of the pilots' protest said they are not comfortable with a visual inspection alone.

    NTSB spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz confirmed visual inspection is an issue in the investigation. "We don't know whether it is adequate or not," he said Friday. But he also noted that investigators are still far from determining what caused the air crash and what recommendations would come out of it.

    In November, U.S. and French airline regulators ordered visual inspections of all Airbus A300-600 planes. Both Airbus and the Federal Aviation Administration report that nothing "out of the ordinary" has been found in more than 300 inspections done so far.

    The tail of the doomed American Flight 587 was fished from Long Island's Jamaica Bay, where it fell seconds before that jet crashed into a residential section of Rockaway Beach. The tail was taken to NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where the National Transportation Safety Board has been conducting a number of tests.

    The NTSB said last week it had found some delamination -- some separation of the glued materials in the tail -- but said it didn't know whether that happened upon impact or may have indicated a pre-existing weakness in the tail.



     
     
     
     



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