Originally Posted by
Panic Stations
To be fair, two of the MD11 crashes were nothing to do with the aircraft design; Swissair was due to a fire in their own IFE installation and Korean Air was just pilot error. The other models of aircraft are not immune to mishaps either, and a number of people died when an A330 crashed whilst on a test flight from Toulouse some years back, a crash partly attributed to a quirk in the autopilot altitude capture mode.
Not quite true, for the Swissair crash the electrical distribution layout design of the MD11 was criticised as was the type of wiring used and installed by McDD to distribute power. The type of wiring (called Kapton) had been abandoned by Boeing (and not used on the 744 of the same design era as the MD11) due to safety concerns, ie toxic fumes if overheated. The poor installation of the IFE, lack of rapid isolation of this system in the event of failure (due to McDD design) and Kapton wiring was a lethal combination
And you are right, the prototype A330 did crash - I meant to say no pax or aircrew have been killed in a crash since EIS of A330/340 or B777. With over 1500 of these in service compared to just 200 MD11's - whichever way you look at it the 330/340/777 safety record in service is infintely superior to the MD11.