Impossible "Double Bird-Strike" or Corporate Cover-up?
Dear Reader,
You are probably aware by now that I strive to provide information you can use in your everyday life via this Blog.  This vital information often takes the form of testimonies from my own everyday life, but sometmes it is presented in the form of links and/or clips from outside sources.
Warning: the following information has already been forwarded to many of you (and my Washington Post connection), so please bear with this re-hash of an old anecdote.
Rewind: ten years (or so) ago, my father was the Regional Aircraft Maintenance Supervisor for a major national airline at a major international hub somewhere in the midwest.  After 35 years of service to that airline (with perfect attendance!), he was contemplating exercising his option on Early Retirement, and the primary factor in that consideration would prove to be the biggest Industrial Secret I was privy to until the Ikea Scandal.
At the time, his employer was updating its fleet from a combination of Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas jets and turboprops for new AirBus jets.
What dear-old-dad shared with me is relevant today more than ever.  Dad told me that the biggest problem facing his hangar crews was the fact that the wear-and-tear-prone parts of the new AirBus jets were made of Composite Materials and required near-Advanced Degrees to service.
Dad was a graduate of NYC's High School of Aviation, and had worked his way up the Aircraft Maintenance ladder from wrench-wielding greasemonkey to Management every single day for more than 30 years.  He missed my Elementary School Graduation (it happeed on a Thursday) and my Carnegie Hall Debut (on a Tuesday) so that he could be given a Gold Watch for his devotion to the company.  In fact, his 35-year career was divided into two eras; he had perfect attendance for 30 years, suffered a minor Cardiac Event in the hangar, was out of work for 1 day, then went on to achieve another 5 years of perfect attendance at his job.  The shitty Airline wouldn't forgive the ONE SICK DAY he took in 35 years and reward him with anything more than that damned 30-year watch.
But I digress...
What dad was faced with was a staff that had to abandon its wrench-and-screwdriver trainig in favor for the crash course in Ceramics being taught by the engineers sent from France to the Midwest in order to educate those poor greasemonkeys on proper AirBus aircraft maintenance. 
Yes, reader, the aircraft components that see the most wear-and-tear (wing flaps, tails and engines) are CHEMICALLY BONDED to the fuselage of AirBus jets.
But why does this matter?  What does this mean?  Think back to November of 2001 when that AirBus jet bound for the Dominican Republic crashed in Belle Harbor, Queens shortly after take-off from JFK.  The jet crashed in one part of the neighborhood, its engines in another and its tail somewhere else.
And yesterday another AirBus (leaving from LGA) crash-landed in the Hudson river.
Today, the NTSB held a press conference and announced that it was using SONAR to locate the engines of the A320.
The fuselage drifted more than a mile down river, completly engine-less.  This is because the engines did not suffer a doubly-catastrophic ingestion of a flock of south-bound Canadian Geese, but rather was the victim of a harried (LGA is one of the most-delayed airports in the world!) hangar crew poorly trained in the delicate balance of chemistry and ceramics; incapable of the finesse necessary to chemically fuse engines to a fuselage made of composite materials under heat-lamps.
Instead of reporting that AirBus jets require a degree in Chemistry in order to maintain their working parts, the media is reporting that the crash-landing of flight 1549 is a "miracle."  What it really is, tho, is a plane (like any other) designed to GLIDE to a safe emergency landing (like every other plane), actually doing what it was MADE TO DO.  With the exception that this jet's engines fell off because of the European knack for saving time.
In European hands, the service-to-fuel-to-flight turnover period is whiddled down to minutes because of the use of ceramics.  In the hands of American greasemonkeys, when the wrench is replaced by the kiln in one of the busiest air-travel corridors in the world, the service-to-fuel-to-flight turnover period can be Corporately sound yet fatally rushed.
Its time for US airlines, OUR media, and the NTSB to stop shielding AirBus (a foreign company!) from the scrutiny it deserves (and the accountability OUR COMMERCIAL PASSENGERS deserve!) and start an inquest into the process, training offered and maintenace practices of ALL jets/airports in the US.