taxizen wrote:Did you really see these things? Are Iranian planes really in such shocking condition?
Ha.. well I was using some poetic licence, inside the passenger cabin you don't see much of what's going on with the plane. There have been shudders and grinding noises which I couldn't altogether put down to turbulence. [/quote]
I see, fair enough. Poetic license.
When you say shudders, you felt the plane shake? How frequent were they throughout the flight? Also how big was the plane, was it one of those old Boeing 747's from the 1970s?
Was turbulence any worse?
taxizen wrote:I hear that Iranians are getting good at manufacturing their own clones of spare parts so an unintended side-effect of the stupid sanctions may be helping Iran develop its aerospace industry. There may come a day when they are making so many of their own parts that they could just as well make their own planes.
Indeed, the Chinese were also good at making their own planes. At one point by the end of Mao Zedong's reign they were developing their own commercial jetliner which looked suspiciously similar to a Boeing 707.
The Shanghai Y-10:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Y-10Poelmo wrote:If the cost of buying new planes/repairing existing ones is x and the cost of a crash once in a while is <x then it's profitable to fly inadequate planes. Only one bastard airline has to pick up on this and fly inadequate planes, this will force all the others to join in this practice or go bankrupt (to be replaced by new airlines that are willing to fly inadequate planes). It's cold hard business and it's why aviation agencies exist in places like the US and Europe (though the libertarians on this forum will tell you those agencies exist solely to bully heroic job creators).
This must be why in countries where safety standards are less strict many airlines are unsafe.