Reuters reported today that 2 more A380s are suffering with cracks in their wings.
According to the story, it’s been determined that the cracks are on non critical brackets inside the wing structure. These brackets connect the wing’s exterior to the ribs inside the wing assembly (that’s non critical??). I’m no Aeronautic engineer, but that part sounds important.
The cracks were discovered during a routine inspection that is conducted every 2 years.
The European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA) plans to issue a safety bulletin on Friday to operators of the A380.
An Airbus spokesperson declined to identify who the owners are of these A380s.
I love how the Airbus engineers state that the cracks were on non critical brackets. As a passenger, I don’t find it more comforting that the crack “isn’t important”. Especially when its found on the structure that helps keep the plane in the air!!
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Robin has it right. These are the parts that distribute the aerodynamic loads from the wing skins to the rib/spar assembly. Essentially they’re secondary load bearing structure.
If you have enough of them fail, you could potentially lose a wing skin section but the probability of that is exceedingly low owing to the shear number of brackets.
I wouldn’t start worrying till you hear stories of cracked wing spars or other primary structure, like some of the airplanes I work with that lead a VERY hard life…
The french have a way of relieving if you really gotta go? 🙂
@Scott: “critical” is different from “needed”. The lavs are needed, but not critical. There’s a whole list of parts on an airplane that the FAA will let you take off without — or at least without them being functional. Airliners are massively overengineered. Twin jets have to be able to take off, land, and (if they’re ETOPS) fly for a hell of a long time on one engine. So arguably the second engine isn’t even “critical”… although I’m not seriously suggesting that. 🙂
The Aviation Week article says “Each wing has around 2,000 L-shaped brackets (30-40 per rib, with 60 ribs per wing), so the failure of one bracket is not seen as a safety issue.”
So, probably more important than a lav (unless you really gotta go), but less than an engine…
I’m not an engineer but as I understand it, these planes are very over-engineered so as to avoid things like wings falling off in bad weather. So if there are a lot of them and they are low load, a crack in a few of them probably doesn’t matter. Obviously if the problem progresses then it definitely matters — hence the inspection and hopefully subsequent fix.
@Scott, “critical” has a different meaning in engineering terms. Engineers design redundancies in structures for this exact reason.
If it isn’t critical why is it there? It was obviously engineered into the design because an engineer determined it was needed.
These kind of statements always sound like cover your a** to me.
Well I am an aero engineer and if I’m thinking of the correct part, it really isn’t critical because there’s so darn many of them on top of being pretty low load components….