Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has extended required main landing-gear checks to cover all variants and weights of Airbus A330/A340 aircraft more than five years old. The new rule requires indefinitely repetitive inspections following last year’s discovery of an unexplained crack in an A330 MLG Rib 6 aft-bearing forward lug. New emergency airworthiness directive (EAD) 2007-0247 R1-E (superseding EAD 2006-0364-E) mandates checks on the whole fleet, adding a flight-hour threshold to previous flight-cycle and age thresholds. 
Airbus said that if the problem does not recur in two years the authority might relax the requirement. The crack, noticed visually on a long-range aircraft with no record of high-overload events, extended completely through the lug, which is a main MLG attachment point. Airbus said introduction of high-interference fit bushes in the lug or even replacement of the entire Rib 6 fitting would not obviate the need for continued repetitive inspection. According to variant, the EAD requires repetitive inspections at 100 to 300 flight cycles or 400 to 1,500 flight-hour intervals (whichever comes first).

Emergency AD Extends A330/A340 Landing-gear Inspections 

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has extended required main landing-gear checks to cover all variants and weights of Airbus A330/A340 aircraft mo

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