Airline chiefs dismiss fears
2009-06-09 14:08
Kuala Lumpur - Several airline chiefs dismissed safety fears over the Airbus A330 on Tuesday, saying they were confident of the plane's reliability despite last week's Air France jet crash.
Emirates Airline President Tim Clark said the company has a fleet of 29 A330-200 planes that have been flying since 1998.
"It is a very robust airplane. It has been flying for many years, clocking hundreds of millions of hours and there is absolutely no reason why there should be any question over this plane. It is one of the best flying today," he said on the sidelines of a global aviation conference here.
Gulf Air Chief Executive Bjorn Naf said he was "not concerned at all" over the safety of the carrier's fleet of 10 A330-200 planes but would wait for directive from Airbus. Gulf has no plans to cancel the 20 A330-300 planes and 15 A320 jets it ordered last year, he said.
Air France Flight 447, flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, killing 228 people on board in the worst aviation accident since 2001.
Search crews have recovered 24 bodies so far and found the vertical stabiliser from the tail section of the A330-200 plane, which could help narrow the hunt for the black boxes to determine why the jet crashed. The data and voice recorders are located in the fuselage near the tail section of the jet.
Airbus Chief Operating Officer John Leahy told reporters late on Monday on the sidelines of a two-day aviation conference in Kuala Lumpur that the A330-200 was a "reliable" plane and that it was too early to conclude otherwise until investigations were completed.
Leahy left Kuala Lumpur later on Monday and other Airbus officials declined to comment pending investigations.
Investigators are considering the possibility that the plane's external speed monitors - called Pitot tubes - that may have iced over and gave dangerously false readings to cockpit computers in a thunderstorm.
According to the Airbus website, total orders for the A330 twin-engine passenger planes so far stood at 956, of which 669 have been delivered. Some 614 jets are operating worldwide - 269 of the larger A330-300 series and 345 of the shorter fuselage A330-200 jets, it said.
- AP
