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What: Air France Airbus A330-200 en route from from Paris to Brazzaville Congo
Where: Maya-Maya airport on the tarmac
When:
Who: Several dozen people were on board the plane,
Why: While taxiing into a parking position, the right winglet (a small vertical section at the tip of the wing) brushed a building just after landing. Although maintenance moved fast to say the plane was fine, the plane will be flown back to France but is banned from taking off with any passengers.

George’s Point of View

I’m not picking on Airbus. Just to prove it, I am going to admit that in this case, the lousy taxi job is probably not due to an innate Airbus flaw (unless massive vehicle size can be construed as a design flaw directly related to the relative ease of negotiating turns on a runway. Maybe the pilot or ground crew was just a ham-handed driver. Come to think of it, parking the 1975 Cadillac Fleetwood was no piece of cake either. )

No, I’m not picking on Airbus. With over 2,500 Airbus A320s flying around, (and who knows how many other Airbus models are still in service) incidents will happen.

But.. look at these statistics:
Airbus A300 – 17 crashes with a total of 1126 fatalities
Airbus A310 – 9 crashes with a total of 825 fatalities
Airbus A319/20/21 – 16 crashes with a total of 637 fatalities
Airbus A330 – 3 with a total of 235 fatalities

——-*——-

That’s a lot of fatalities. The number of deaths–almost 400 in June alone–this works out to a lot of misery spread around to a lot of families.

I’m not picking on Air France, either. Air France isn’t responsible for the Yemenia Flight 626 that crashed June 30th 2009 with 152 fatalities and one miracle survivor.

But even if I am not picking on Airbus, someone with lots of muscle (like all the citizens of France) should be doing just that.

Enough deaths. It is past time to fix the problem.