After an Air Transat flight from Varadero to Quebec City had to turn back last Sunday, this story appeared at CBC.ca (emphasis added):

Several Air Transat airplanes were temporarily grounded Sunday after the rudder on a plane flying from Cuba to Quebec City nearly fell off.

On Saturday, an Air Transat Airbus 310 flying from Varadero, Cuba to Quebec City developed what the airline reported as mechanical difficulty about 30 minutes into the flight.

A spokesperson for the airline said the plane’s rudder “partially fell off.”

Here are some photos of the rudder that “nearly fell off” (hi-res versions).

I don’t think this is a glass half-empty, glass half-full kind of event. The rudder is gone. It is no more. It is an ex-rudder.

This is troubling for several reasons:

1) American Airlines Flight 587: November 12, 2001, an Airbus 300 crashed shortly after takeoff from JFK. The NTSB’s report said that “contributing to the crash were characteristics of the airplane’s rudder system design and elements of the airline’s pilot training program…”, but that “the composite material used in constructing the vertical stabilizer was not a factor in the accident”. The vertical stablizer was found over two miles away from the main impact site in Jamaica Bay.

2) Airbus may have been less than forthcoming about what it knew about problems with their rudders:

American has waged an aggressive campaign in recent weeks to convince the NTSB board, its staff and the agency’s investigative staff that the plane’s manufacturer hid damning evidence of previous incidents involving the rudder of the same aircraft model. American’s last-minute lobbying has succeeded in raising fresh doubts among some board members about whether American, Airbus SAS and the board communicated effectively about safe operation of the A300-600’s rudder, according to sources familiar with the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the findings were not official yet.

Also, Airbus may have pressured the NTSB to shift the blame for flight 587:

Ellen Connors, the NTSB chair, told reporters last January that the report was delayed because of ‘inappropriate’ and ‘intense’ lobbying by Airbus over its contents, adding: ‘The potential for contaminating the investigation exists.’

3) It is unclear whether visual inspections of glass fiber composite materials can even detect a damaged component, even if failure is imminent. Delamination of the layered structure of a component may not present any external signs whatsoever. From the Observer:

In an article published after the flight 587 crash, Professor James Williams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world’s leading authorities in this field, said that to rely on visual inspection was “a lamentably naive policy. It is analogous to assessing whether a woman has breast cancer by simply looking at her family portrait.”

The industry has much more experience in inspecting metal components for fatigue, but that knowledge came at a dear price.

4) What were the passengers told? (original story unavailable, link goes to Google cache):

But the story relayed to the passengers, and by the passengers to the Quebec media, was that the Americans had refused to let the plane make an emergency landing in the U.S. because of the long-standing embargo on trade with Cuba.

Air Transat has since clarified that no emergency was declared, and that the decision to return to Cuba was their own, but their press release does not dispute the account of what the passengers themselves were told. Did Air Transat resort to anti-Americanism even while trying to land a damaged aircraft?

(Hat tips to: Ghost of a flea, Short Final, Cleared to Land, and BitsBlog.)