Airline Safety & The IL-76

Once again, a Russian built IL-76 cargo plane has decided to have a few "problems" with the idea of controlled flight. This event was a little different than most of the others in that a just a door decided to fall off, instead of the entire airplane crashing. The resultant loss of life was nearly equivalent to a full crash.

Looking closely at photographs of the IL-76 you can see the basic design flaw that led to the accident. Notice the open door. It's not a plug door like that used on most virtually every other commercial airplane in existence. The reason behind the plug door is that should the hinges fail, the air pulls the door into its frame, maintaining the integrity of the airframe during flight.

With the IL-76 not having a plug door, as soon as the hinges failed, the door would have flown off, causing the swirling winds and suction described by the survivors of the flight. It was a faulty design that directly led to the deaths of all those people.

The IL-76 is gaining a rather checkered safety record lately. Unfortunately, it is not terribly unusual for a Russian built airplane. As more and more Russian built airplanes fly into the US the risk of one of these tragedies taking place here increases. And the IL-76, the most poorly designed of the whole bunch, is the most common Russian built plane to fly in the US due to its oversize cargo capacity.

It is really unfortunate that there isn't another airplane with the same capabilities. Then we could ban the aircraft from the US as being unairworthy - which it really is.

It's too bad that there isn't enough demand for outsized cargo to justify Boeing ramping up the C-17 line. Getting some commercial C-17s might just be the answer to the current safety issues presented by the IL-76.