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"Dutch Roll is a coupled out of phase movement of the aircraft as result of weakened directional stability (provided by the vertical tail and rudder), in which the aircraft oscillates around its vertical as well as longitudinal axis (coupled yaw and roll)." That sounds pretty scary. I wonder why it wasn't bigger news when it happened last month?
For anyone else (besides me, being Dutch) wondering about the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_roll?useskin=vector#Name TL;DR: it's from ice skating where there's a similar move. But no idea why it's called that in ice skating.
Maar waarom een schaatsterm?
The local mechanics couldn’t figure it out, so this team was assembled from the mechanics at headquarters to fix the plane.
They inspected the plane and found no damage. They had the pilots make multiple test flights - they could not reproduce the problem. The pilots were adamant that the plane was broken. Engineers from Airbus ended up flying out to assist. They couldn’t identify any problems.
After a few months of effort and a lot of very expensive dart throwing and parts swapping, they gave up. As far as anyone could tell, there was never anything wrong with the plane, and based on comments overheard from the pilots, they simply did not like this particular plane. It had been pulled from a boneyard and recertified, and they considered flying it beneath them.
FIL did come home with some cuban cigars and really high quality counterfeit Fluke multimeters he got from the local market, though.
Taking delivery of old orders is one thing, since they can't really back out of those, but placing new orders implies that some level of trust remains for this company, and I just don't see how that makes any sense at all?
Edit: yep, faa confirming today
"Dutch Roll is a coupled out of phase movement of the aircraft as result of weakened directional stability (provided by the vertical tail and rudder), in which the aircraft oscillates around its vertical as well as longitudinal axis (coupled yaw and roll)." That sounds pretty scary. I wonder why it wasn't bigger news when it happened last month?
Here's a video demonstrating it: https://youtu.be/Zmjam1evDD4
It kinda bothers me that airlines are still placing orders for new Boeing airplanes. Taking delivery of old orders is one thing, since they can't really back out of those, but placing new orders implies that some level of trust remains for this company, and I just don't see how that makes any sense at all?
"Dutch Roll is a coupled out of phase movement of the aircraft as result of weakened directional stability (provided by the vertical tail and rudder), in which the aircraft oscillates around its vertical as well as longitudinal axis (coupled yaw and roll)." That sounds pretty scary. I wonder why it wasn't bigger news when it happened last month?
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Thing is this could just keep going. There’s no telling how many bad apples Boeing put out there
But for physical defects, yeah that's scary.