It is my understanding that "some" work has been done in retrofit of flammable insulation. Anyone know if some airlines are more proactive in this than others .if so which airlines.
Good question. We don't know which airlines are most proactive.
Here is an update from Air Safety Week as of last September:
quote:Time's Running Out. Air Safety Week, Sept 29, 2003
Progress is not keeping pace with a mandate to remove all metalized Mylar thermal acoustic blanketing material from hundreds of Douglas-built jets within five years. An outgrowth of the 1998 crash of a Swissair MD-11, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued two airworthiness directives on May 26, 2000, calling for removal of the material, the burned evidence of which was recovered from the wreckage of the Swissair trijet (see ASW, June 5, 2000).
AD 2000-11-01 affected approximately 600 Douglas twinjets (DC-9, MD80/90). AD 2000-11-02 addressed the DC-10 and MD-11 fleet numbering some 76 airplanes. With 65 percent of the allowed time elapsed, the work has been completed on less than half the fleet, according to FAA sources.
So far, the work has been completed on about 260 aircraft, suggesting an average retrofit rate of about seven aircraft per month since the effective date of the ADs. With 21 months remaining to the June 5, 2005, deadline and work still to be done on more than 400 aircraft, the pace of the retrofit rate will have to pick up by a factor of three, to an average of about 20 planes per month having the material removed and replaced with more flame-resistant blanket material.
Snapshot of Status - Thermal Acoustic Blanket Material Retrofit As of September 2003 (Aircraft, No. of Aircraft, Number completed or % of work done, partial installations) DC-9, MD-80/90, 600, 220,37 % of fleet DC-10, MD-11, 76, 41, 54 % of fleet Total, 676, 261, 39 % of fleet Source: FAA Copyright 2003 PBI Media, LLC. All rights reserved. COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
