Beoz

Yeah I bank on the 4 engines and that if one goes the other 3 are going to do their job. I do like the take offs on the A380. Its so quiet. On my last flight the couple next to me ended their marriage during take off. I could hear it word for word.

renth

I love the A380 but it's the only plane I've flown on recently that's had technical problems. Delayed on the tarmac at Heathrow for a couple of hours one trip and another time had to slow down and descend because of a fuel problem, right over northern Iraq when ISIS were running amok!

But really, only minor stuff. I like 777's as a plane but the seats in economy on Emirates are so hard they cause me a great deal of discomfort, pain even - I can't get to sleep even with alcohol and downers!

astera

It can still land on one, but overall the number of engines is where I prefer to see 2 rather than 4 (only exception is the A340 over the A330). Engines are the main source of trouble, so why double the chances of something going wrong?

Rhubarb65

Nope, not for me! Engines are extremely reliable in service, but if one goes pop, I would prefer to have the redundancy of 3 remaining rather than one. Having said that, I imagine the real difference is marginal.

OzTennis

More than the engines it is the servicing of them - some airlines shoddily service Boeing and Airbus products. I have a friend who is an aeronautical engineer based at Tulla and he told me some of the airlines to be wary of - no names mentioned!

astera

Maybe you should mention a few names?

Is the shoddy servicing due to outsourcing to dubious companies located in not-so-well-regulated areas?

Beoz

Actually - pilots are.

Pollyana

I think you'll find more crashes have been caused by faullty engines than by faulty pilots.

OzTennis

No names but steer clear of certain Asian airlines in particular but the likes of Singapore and Cathay Pacific ok. I think all airlines (and nearly all businesses) outsource now in an attempt to cut costs, without regard to customer service.

Amazulu

The high-bypass turbofan is an example of western technology, innovation and capitalism

An incredible piece of engineering

xizzles

To be fair, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific have way too much to lose if they are caught out short on maintenance and safety. It's simply not worth the risk for these national carriers of small countries that depend so much on the corruption-free and rule of law and open skies reputation!

Beoz

Really?

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

OzTennis

Did I say you only have to worry about non-national carriers? I just gave 2 examples of national carriers who do look after maintenance.

Wol

The old one goes something like this:

The only way I feel comfortable is when there's a loud bang, the engineer leans forward and says "We've lost number five, Skip" and I can reply "What side?"

Wol

The critical word is "caused", Polly.

It's a given that very few accidents have a single cause. There are so many checks and crosschecks in aviation (as you know), and so much system redundancy in modern aircraft, that single, double and more failures rarely "cause" an accident. The Swiss Cheese analogy says that if you slice a chunk of it into a dozen slices and shuffle them around there's a very small chance of all the holes lining up so you can push a pen through. However, every so often all the slices will line up with holes in register except one - and in the analogy that one is the pilot (more accurately, the crew.) If that slice can't cope the pen slips through and the phone goes at the CAA/NTSB or whatever.

Accident reports never, in the developed world, say that xyz caused the accident, but the "probable cause" was abc. The series of failures of systems, procedures and the like are often the precursor to the "failure" of the crew to be able to recover the situation.

Single engine failures even during a limiting takeoff are not a real problem but as the case of the QF32 out of Singapore showed, having over fifty subsequent system failures resulting from a big fan letting loose certainly is. The crew did a fantastic job of handling the emergency (despite the best efforts of the computers to hinder them) but if they had been overwhelmed no doubt after several years of legal poring over the manuals the crew would have been, in the media at least, "to blame".