From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Sun May 26 2002 - 08:49:15 MDT
On Sun, May 26, 2002 at 12:04:25AM -0700, James Rogers wrote:
>
> What makes the story interesting, and what many people don't know, is that
> there is an ongoing FBI investigation into the apparent fact that Boeing has
> been the victim of industrial sabotage. I don't know the details of this,
> but I do know that the FBI has been investigating the intentional sabotage
> of parts both within their own manufacturing facilities and in their
> distribution chain, including some parts that have been implicated in some
> rather spectacular failures. Mind you, this type of crap is not exactly
> unprecedented. My guess would be that it is a campaign being conducted by a
> government associated with Airbus (the separation between government and
> industry being very fuzzy in most of Europe).
Not true: Airbus is a fully separate company -- one owned by a consortium
of aerospace companies, in fact. The European aerospace industry went
through a period of state-mandated consolidation in the 1950's and 1960's,
but since the late 1970's it's been about the first target for privatization
in every European country to go that way.
I find it inconceivable that even a national government with a competing
product (and none exist -- see point about Airbus being privately owned,
above) would stoop to blowing up the competition, for much the same reason
that I find suggestions that the Apollo project was faked ludicrous. It
implies a conspiracy, and a _big_ one, and it can be blown wide open
by just one disgruntled employee who feels like joining the US Federal
Witness Protection Program. And if blown open, such a conspiracy would
backfire badly. Quite simply, the costs -- potential and actual -- far
outweigh any possible benefits.
(Here's a clue some Americans don't seem to get: the reason Airbus is
eating Boeing's lunch isn't that they're being subsidized by governments
or selling at a loss, but because they've spent twenty years designing a
range of airliners with interchangable parts, identical user interfaces,
and a shitload of features that make it cheaper to operate a fleet of
Airbuses than a mish-mash of Boeing and re-badged ex-MacDac kit. Boeing
seem to have lost their way around 1990, after the 777 was on the boards;
they might be about to seize the initiative back by opening up a new market
with the Sonic Cruiser, and I'll applaud them if they do, but for now
Airbus have figured out how to make money at the unromantic job of
building extremely boring, reliable, cheap airliners, and Boeing seem
to have forgotten what they used to know in the 1950's through 1970's.)
What's more, there's no motive for it. Airbus doesn't yet have a Jumbo-
class airliner -- the prototype A380 isn't due to fly for another two years,
and it sure as hell won't be in the same market niche as the 747-200. If
anything, that'll have to wait until they stretch the A340 a bit more.
> It could very well be a
> random accident, but if it was anything else, this is what I would guess.
I strongly suspect it's an accident, and not a random one: the wiring
runs in early 747's go through the fuel tanks in the centre section, and
this was implicated not only in TWA800 but in a couple of other crashes
of Boeing models of a similar vintage. The theory is that the insulation
degrades over time, and if there's an explosive fuel/air vapour mix in
a nearly-empty tank _and_ an insulation failure on more than one wire
you might get a spark, then BOOM. The China Airlines plane was climbing
on a short flight. It wouldn't have had full tanks unless CA wanted
to waste gas towing seventy tons of aviation fuel up to altitude and
bringing it back down again. Most tellingly, it was on its *last day*
in service with CA -- they were selling it on to a freight outfit.
I find the possibility that it's a design flaw on an older plane,
aggravated to the point of catastrophe by cost-cutting on the maintenance
schedule of an aircraft that was shortly to stop being China Airways'
problem, far more compelling than any paranoid conspiracy theories
about foreign governments trying to bring down airliners(!) just to
boost their own sales of (an as yet non-existent) competing type.
-- Charlie
Out now: "Toast, and other rusted futures" -- available via my blog
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi
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