Which commercial airline accidents had the greatest impact?

Not that poorly repaired. But the repair did not follow Boeing procedure. The repair lasted some from 1978 to 1985 . Boeing calculated that this incorrect installation would fail after approximately 10,000 pressurizations; the aircraft accomplished 12,318 (cycles) successful flights from the time that the faulty repair was made to when the crash happened. I remember seeing a show on it and Boeing told the airline to inspect the repair after so many cycles. JAL did not follow up on that. IIRC the chief engineer for JAL committed suicide after the accident.

docfl
Yes poorly repaired this repair calles for two rows of a particular type of rivet . The repair, as carried out consisted of one row with the wrong type of rivets. The later is hard to see unless you look very carefully ,but missing one row of rivets?
Frankly this is a series of human errors which were not discovered because the correct procedures were ignored.
I think this fails the test of impact because it taught the industry nothing it didnt already know
 
In terms of the emotional impact on the people of a small island, the 1958 Munich disaster was pretty massive.
 
Might Britain's aviation industry have been much more successful if the adaptions had been made to the Comet before the accidents?
The Comet was in truth too small to compete with the 707 but it would have had the market to itself for about 5 years and would have been more successful. This would have paved the way for the bigger Vickers VC-7 that could have really given Boeing a run for its money. Even then the industry was in urgent need of modernisation so as to fully exploit the opportunities that would have been open.
Whilst nice as The Oncoming Storm says it was too small to compete with a 707, a fact that was recognised at the time which led to looking at possible replacements like the VC7 but the process was screwed up, but would of had four or five years of uncontested ownership of the airliner market bringing in some very useful income. The real missed opportunities in my opinion were the original design for the De Havilland DH121 and the later Hawker Siddeley HS134 which would of allowed British aircraft companies to keep roughly on a level with Boeing's 727, possibly beating them to introduction by a year or two, or in the case of the HS134 coming out with what would of effectively been a 757 15 years ahead of them. Both of them were screwed up thanks to serial bungling on the parts of the British European Airlines or the government. But I think this is getting a little far away from the original topic so I'll leave it there.
 
R101 & Hindenburg Killed the Airship as a means of international travel.
The Comet Crashes killed Britains leed in Jet airliners.
 
Actually, it was SAA Flight 201 which did the real damage, if De Havilland hadn't declared the aircraft as safe to fly until they'd figured out what had brought down BOAC Flight 781 they might have been able to hang on in the margins, but as it was, its reputation was ruined by that second crash.
 
Well first wide body to crash so yes an impact there [no pun intended]
But was anything new discovered? Well no . What was reinforced was the mantra 'in an emergency first thing is fly the aircraft'
I worked at a flight training school where this incident was used as an example of what not to do

Surely that makes it pretty significant?
Didn't it also highlight the 'god-captain' issue around the same time as Tenerife and result in serious inspections at Miami Airport?
 
Surely that makes it pretty significant?
Didn't it also highlight the 'god-captain' issue around the same time as Tenerife and result in serious inspections at Miami Airport?

Well no, in that it merely reininforced that cockpit resource management procedures should be followed [and wern't in this case].
I admit that the procedures were not as refined as they are today, but that is not as a result of this one incident.
I think incident is the right word here, as accident has connotations of chance or even inevitability which was most definatably not the case here
Every one of the cockpit crew failed in their first duty which was to fly the aircraft.
If the point here is to indicate where the aircraft industry took a radical turn then I think this one is a fail
It certainly added to the consensus that crew should follow procedures where there is a deviation from the norm but that is all.
 
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