A300's Checkered Past

The European-made A300 Airbus jetliner that crashed Monday in New York was designed three decades ago to challenge American domination of commercial aviation.

The wide-bodied, twin-engine airliner and its successors, the A310 and A320, are built by the French-British consortium Airbus Industrie Ltd.

Some components are manufactured in Germany and Spain, and the planes use U.S.-designed General Electric or Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines.

The Airbus 300 was introduced in 1969, and about 500 are in service with airlines around the world.

The A300s can be configured to carry 220 to 360 passengers and a crew of about 10, including two pilots. The 17-foot-wide fuselage may have up to nine seats across.

The American Airlines A300 that crashed after taking off from Kennedy airport carried 246 passengers and nine crewmembers, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

This airplane was an Airbus Industrie A-300-600. American has a total of 35 A-300s in its fleet, including the aircraft that was lost Monday. The aircraft was built in Toulouse, France. The tail number of the airplane is N14053, and the aircraft entered service with American Airlines as a brand new aircraft on July 12 of 1988.

This aircraft had its last "A" check on November 11 this year. It had its last "B" check, which is a somewhat heavier maintenance check, on October 3 of this year, and its last main-base visit for a major overhaul was on December 9 of 1999. It was scheduled for a major main-base visit in July of 2002.

The aircraft had two General Electric CF6-80C2A5 engines, and the time on the number one engine on board that airplane had 694 hours since its last overhaul. The number two engine, which is the right engine, had 9,788 hours since its last overhaul. An engine will typically have a major overhaul every 10,000 hours. The last time the number two engine was in for a shop inspection was 2,887 hours ago.

The first incident involving an A300 was an Air France flight hijacked in June 1976, while en route to Tel Aviv, and taken to Entebbe. Israeli commandos flew into Uganda and freed 258 hostages. Seven passengers and the terrorists were killed.

On July 3, 1988, the missile cruiser USS Vincennes shot down an IranAir A300 over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 on board. A Pentagon inquiry found the cruiser's weapons system computer misidentified the plane as an Iranian fighter.

Hijackers seized another Air France A300 at Algiers on Christmas Eve, 1994, killing three of the 267 passengers before commandoes took control and killed four hijackers.

Five years later, hijackers in India took over a domestic Indian Airlines A300 after takeoff from Kathmandu, Nepal. One of the 173 passengers was killed.

Other A300 crashes: