Certification: How Planes Prove They're Safe

Before a plane can carry passengers, the manufacturer has to convince regulators (the FAA in America, the EASA in Europe) that the plane is safe. To earn an “airworthiness certificate”, the manufacturer has to prove both that:

• things will almost never go wrong
• when they do go wrong, it’s in the safest way possible.

This belt-and-suspenders approach to safety should be very reassuring to the nervous flyer.

The simplest way to test that things will almost never go wrong is to fly. A lot. In different ways. They fly it to cold airports. They fly it to hot airports. They fly it on short flights. They fly it on long flights. From rainy airports. From desert airports. One flight, two flight, red flight, blue flight. For the new 787, one test pilot alone hit 1000 hours flying. But that’s the boring part: getting to fly a plane without worrying about passenger delays or baggage must be pleasant.

The interesting, confidence-inspiring part is testing failures. If a cupholder fails, the plane should still be flyable. If the engines fail, obviously the plane is no longer flyable, but it should still be landable. I’ll tell you about some of the awe-inspiring, crazy things they do to airplanes before you or I are ever allowed to step foot onboard.

Types of Planes

For every job a plane does, there is a unique and special kind of plane. And of this grand menagerie of sorts and shapes of plane, you are likely to ever fly in... one. The Airliner.

In future posts, I’ll tell you about all the kinds of toys that you can see but not touch. But first I’m going to break down the different kinds of Airliner (and how the differences affect you).

The Airliner
The Airliner takes people and goods from point A to point B. Efficiency and Safety are the Airliner’s most important attributes. People have proposed lots of crazy designs, but actual airliners are tubes with wings.

In order of increasing size, the main types of Airliners are:

Regional Airliners
Regional Airliners are the planes you hate to fly. If you’re flying from Cleveland to Chicago, you’re on a Regional Airliner. If you can touch both sides of the plane from your seat, you’re on a Regional Airliner. These planes seat fewer than 100 people, with two to five people per row. They have two engines, either small jets (often on the rear of the plane) or propellers. (And if you look closely, you’ll notice they’re operated by a different company: American Eagle instead of American or DeltaConnection instead of Delta.) You would rather not be on this plane, but how often does your cousin get married?

Narrowbodies
The Narrowbody is the first Airliner worthy of the name. It seats 6 people per row, 3 on each side of the aisle. This is the plane for most flights you’ll take within the US and some shorter overwater routes (western Europe, Caribbean). Virgin, JetBlue, and Southwest fly only narrowbodies. Popular models are the Boeing 737, 757, and Airbus A320. Narrowbodies are the bread-and-butter of airlining.

Widebodies
Widebodies have two aisles. They’re easier to move around in, and they just feel bigger inside. They seat anywhere from 7 people (in a 2-3-2 configuration, i.e., 2 on the left side, 3 in the middle, 2 on the right) to 10 (in a 3-4-3) configuration. They fly transcontinental routes (New York to California) or across oceans (to Europe, Asia, or Australia). These are the planes plane-lovers love to love. They’re the majestic beauties and technological wonders. They’re powered by 2 huge jet engines or 4 still-rather-large ones. Popular models include the Boeing 747, 767, 777, 787, and the Airbus A330, A340, A350, and A380.

Boeing 367-80

[This is the first entry in a series about planes whose names lie.]

In the early 1950’s, jet engines were loud, unreliable, inefficient and the future. Plane-makers were stuck between the evolutionary (tried and true propeller-based planes) and the revolutionary (high-risk/high-reward jets). A (then-)minor manufacturer called Boeing chose revolution.

The result was the Boeing 707 (first flight 1957), the Model T of the Jet Age. Everything before it is a horse-pulled plane; everything since is a tweak.

Boeing’s huge reward from the 707 makes it easy to forget the risk involved. Airlines didn’t believe in jetliners, so Boeing built a proof-of-concept on its own dime. Boeing would need a plane to sell quickly, before more-established competitors could enter the market. Boeing ensured their head-start by keeping the project secret.

One piece of deception was naming the prototype “367-80”, which implies the 80th rework of the Boeing 367 (a pre-jet, 1942 design). These planes shared a fuselage diameter (132 inches) and little else. Boeing hoped competitors would dismiss any leaks as a warming-over of a tired concept. Boeing insisted they were bringing a knife to a knife fight while they were building the world’s first gun.

Today’s plane buffs can’t bring ourselves to pigeonhole this seminal plane as a derivative of the 367, ignoring the alleged ancestor and focus on the advance. We call it the “Dash 80”.

By Any Other Name

The Ford Mustang is a model of car. Yet, it’s not really one model. A part from a Mustang GT may fit into a Mustang V6, or it may not. A part from a 1964 Mustang would almost certainly not fit in a 2012 Mustang, and if it did it would be a horrendous waste of classic carmanship. And yet, parts from separate car models may interchange, as in the blue collar Dodge Caravan and its Yuppie-er brother the Chrysler Town and Country. A car model isn’t a technical designation but a marketing construct.

Planes have models too. 707. F/A-18 “Hornet”. DC-10. 367-80. Yes, the names are less evocative and more numerical, but this fits with the more Aspergian nature of plane enthusiasts. But the same questions come back: where does one model end and another begin? Most cases are clear cut, and hence, boring.

This week on Mad Props, I’m going to show you cases where model numbers were assigned for political and not technical reasons. Where money won out over reason. Minor upgrades that got whole new names, and clean-sheet designs that never got their due. When it comes to plane models, he who pays the piper gets to not only call the tune, but name it too.