Airbus A340-300 (9H-TQY)

Love the Landing Gear Retracting.....

Super Pic

Epic!

I flew these for Air Mauritius 26 years ago. What a gutless wonder. I remember being 10 miles off the end of the runway before having enough speed to have the flaps up and climbing at 1000fpm (or less) at gross weight until we could accelerate to 280-300kts at 10,000ft and finally get a reasonable climb rate. Doing a Cat3 approach was always fun because if you tried to go around most likely you would touchdown before you would have enough thrust to climb. Not my favorite airplane to fly, I later flew 747's and A330's and they were a lot better, not so close to the edge of disaster. I have no wonder why so many of these are grounded or cut up now. Yes, they were long range and you didn't have ETOPS to deal with but god help you if you lost an engine the performance just wasn't there, you needed all those little tiny engines all the time.

Interesting revelations Jaffe. So did the A340 have an APR facility so that, in the event of an engine failure at or after V1, it would be able to maintain at least a minimum climb gradient on the 3 remaining engines as required by certification?

Thanks Jaffe, very interesting.

Love the cleanes, Only ONE colour

looks naked and anemic IMO