Airbus A300

Exactly.

Captain Eric Jonat and First Officer Steve Mickelsen, they were flying an Airbus A300, and just as they gained altitude, an SA-14 surface-to-air missile fired by insurgents slammed directly into their left wing.

Wow.

The wing catches fire instantly, right?

Yeah.

Because sitting on the tarmac at Baghdad Airport is a 24-year-old DHL Airbus A300 cargo plane.

Yeah.

Inside that cockpit, it is sterile.

The ailerons, the elevators, the rudder.

Exactly.

And the Airbus A300 relies on three entirely independent color-coded hydraulic systems.

You have green, yellow, and blue.

So that's everything from an A310 through to an A330-300P2F or the factory A330-200 freighter.

truth be told there's very few a310s left now so really your kind of sweet spot is the 50 55 to 70 ton sector which of course is dominated at the moment by both 767 factory freighter and the 300 er bdsf bcf converted freighter and the substantial fleet also of converted and factory delivered a300 converted and factory aircraft, which are a substantial part of this market.

Yes, of course, the market is gradually transitioning now to the larger A330-300P2F and 200P2F, but those aircraft are still in relative terms, quite early stages of their kind of life cycle of converted freighters, compared to more established 767 and A300.

So yeah, that's that really.

Oversupply is tight.

It's a black day in US Navy history.

Obviously, a black day for the Iranians on that Airbus A300 and their families.

And you write, quote, "This is not a story about operator error, though there was operator error, or about inadequate technology.

It's the story of a structural failure mode that no amount of additional processing power can fix, because the failure is not computational." So can you just recap the incident, the Vincennes-Iranian airliner shootdown, and then just explain a little bit that structural failure mode that you're discussing in the article?

This all happened about a month ago.

I went to Walmart on my way to work, and we don't have a uniform, but I was wearing a navy blue polo with a picture of a UPS plane that said UPS Airbus 300 underneath.

Nothing like a Walmart employee.

While I'm there, I go to the freezer aisle to grab a meal.

And Jens, what's different about, uh, the A350F is it's purpose-designed.

Airbus has had freighters before with the, uh, A300 and A330, but, but those were just based on passenger aircraft, right?

It's good that you mention that.

But the, the interesting part is kind of the, the timeline of this.

So obviously, Airbus entered the commercial aircraft market with the A300 passenger aircraft, and then developed also a freighter version of that, uh, the A300 freighter, which is still flying today with FedEx and UPS, for example.

European Air Transport has a, has a quite, uh, significant fleet.

But production of that ended in 2007.

So we now have this 20-year gap between the A300, which was kind of the last successful, what you could call successful freighter that Airbus built, and the 350F, which is, you know, happens to come, you know, uh, to enter service, you know, exactly 10, uh, 20 years later.

Yeah, I'd be, and you, like, y- if I did, if I knew there wasn't a flight control, like, how do you d- talk to the other guy to say, "Hey, we're..." Just like Al Haynes did in, in the United flight in Sioux City, Iowa, when they used all those guys to fly the airplane with the power and the throttles.

Like, how do you coordinate with the other guy to say, "Hey, let's not use the rudder for any reason in case the whole, you know, vertical stab comes off"? Because that's happened in aircraft, too, like the Airbus, uh, A300 that the vertical stab came off in New- Americans ...

LaGuardia- Yeah ... couple weeks after 9/11.

They- Yeah ... cycled the rudder pedals, and it ripped the tail off.

It's exclusive to him with a slight exception, kind of a minor exception for the secretary of defense, but no one else.

After all, you've got somebody who's about to say there are 230 innocent people on this Airbus 300, which is what that plane was.

And I'm going to murder them to save whatever.

And the thinking at the time was the plane was probably headed to Washington.

It's a bright, sunny Sunday morning.

We are in the cockpit of a massive Airbus A300, Iran Air Flight 655.

Captain Mohsen Rezaian, a 37-year-old veteran pilot.

I mean, this guy has over 10,000 hours of flight time.

Which saves time and money by enabling workers to clean cabins faster.

Now the pillows will be tossed from 737s, 757s, Airbus A300s, and a bunch of other airplanes that are no longer even in the fleet.

Passengers flying coast to coast, New York to California, for example, won't be affected.

I have a feeling they were.