My degree is in Aerospace Engineering, so I have followed aviation even as I drove ships around the ocean for a living.
I am concerned when planes lose major chunks in flight. AVweb has a story on the Latest Airbus Missing Rudder involving Air Transat, a Canadian charter airline, Airbus A310. The Mail & Guardian story is here and an interesting blog analysis here.
Update 1: France Issues Emergency Airworthiness Directive On Airbus Rudders
Update 2: US inspections are now required, but Reuters gets it wrong. The rudder did not “nearly fall off.“ See the pictures below.
Most of the mainstream media reported it as an Airbus who had “lost a portion of its rudder“ and then returned to the airport it came from in Cuba. Here is what that “portion“ really consisted of.
Scary. I would say about 98% of the surface and all of the aerodynamic control disappeared into the ocean. The red along the edges is not rust, but (supposedly) super-strong super-lightweight composite material. Much of the new A380 super jumbo will be made of this material to save weight. I do not think I will ever fly in one.
Interestingly, Air Transat was also involved with a 2001 incident where an Airbus A330 had a major fuel rupture in an engine during a trans-Atlantic flight, ran out of gas, and had to glide unpowered to an emergency landing at Lajes, Portugal. Luckily the island was within gliding range.
I found this somewhat inadvertently. Things are sparse at the moment, but I see that the forums on the Windows Forms website will be moving the the MSDN site. I wonder if this is the eventual future for Microsoft's newsgroups? What else may be moving?
A welcome message says is reasonably enough: "Welcome to the Microsoft Forums for Visual Studio 2005 Q & A. Many of you might recognize some similarity with the Asp.Net Forums. We've taken the 2.0 version of that code base and extended upon it to include Q & A handling, Passport authentication, integration with the VS 2005 Beta 2 Help Viewer and several other features. What you are viewing now is a preview of the Microsoft.com hosted beta web forum solution.
"As a preview Beta, there are still several bugs we are working through. We appreciate your patience as we work through these."
Moderated forums are a good idea.