Back in the early 90's, Boeing was flight testing the Navy version of a 707 called the E-6. One of the test parimeters ,was to take the aircraft to "Max Q" , put the rudder hard over, hold that for a short time, and do an immediate rudder reversal, ie hard over the other way. They came back with a significant portion of the vertical tail and rudder missing. So I guess we should have seen this comming . Though I'm not a fan of Airbus, they, and Boeing, have been building to the same FAA standards for a long time. Just happend to be an airbus aircraft to break first, with a load of passengers, because of marginal industry (read FAA) standards.
