Airbus Is Ordered To Inspect 16 Jets After Cracks Are Found In Wings (wsj.com) 58
schwit1 shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has ordered (PDF) urgent inspections of 16 Airbus A380 planes operated by Emirates and Qantas, after cracks were found in a wing component on some aircraft (source paywalled; alternative source).. Cracks were found during earlier inspections of the wing spars structure, a key component of the wing, EASA said in a directive effective Wednesday. EASA determined that they "could reduce the structural integrity of the wing."
"To address this potential unsafe condition, Airbus determined that an additional special detailed inspection has to be accomplished," EASA said. The first group of five aircraft, operated by Emirates, need to be inspected immediately, while the second group of 11 aircraft can be inspected later but within 25 flight cycles, EASA said in a separate statement. From the second group, 10 are operated by Emirates and one by Qantas, the aviation safety agency said.
"To address this potential unsafe condition, Airbus determined that an additional special detailed inspection has to be accomplished," EASA said. The first group of five aircraft, operated by Emirates, need to be inspected immediately, while the second group of 11 aircraft can be inspected later but within 25 flight cycles, EASA said in a separate statement. From the second group, 10 are operated by Emirates and one by Qantas, the aviation safety agency said.
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If you ain't going, then you will be boing.
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Just to clarify here, by "... that turd of a company", are you referring to Boeing?
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It is just some really dumb people having a circle-jerk.
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Let's face it, Boeing turned into a shitshow.
But remember that when your properly documented wins fall off, I*t's okay to die in a flaming wreck, because Boeing. Good to know.
Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you people"?
Would a Spar be Repairable? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Would a Spar be Repairable? (Score:5, Informative)
Possibly repairable with the application of doubler plates, depending on the extent of cracking. Replacing a wing spar may be uneconomical and result in the aircraft being written off. Such major structural repairs may be possible in other parts of an aircraft. But not so much the wings. The entire weight hangs from those.
Re:Would a Spar be Repairable? (Score:5, Interesting)
As production has ended, if the A380 is genuinely necessary, then the economics shift somewhat. That doesn't mean they CAN be replaced, from the sounds of it they can't* (at least in many cases), but the inability to replace the aircraft would mean that options that aren't rational become necessary.
*I have to be careful here. If the wing is designed to be the absolute minimum weight possible, then I don't see how they could be without fully disassembling the entire wing and then reconstructing it from the ground up. And adhesives/welding might mean that just can't be done. At all. On the other hand, there's no obvious reason why you couldn't design a wing to have far more structural support than actually needed AND make spars deliberately maintainable and replaceable. I don't have an A380 handbook in front of me, so can't say how Airbus approached this. But it seems improbable that they're built to be swapped.
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Even if repairing the damaged A380 is not feasible, but an A380 is still desirable for the route, there are dozens of A380s that have been retired or are in long-term storage (a couple of dozen more have been scrapped already). I expect any of the owners of those planes would be happy to get them off their hands (assuming that none of them are already owned by the affected carriers).
Re:Would a Spar be Repairable? (Score:5, Interesting)
The A380-800 wing is massively oversized because it has been designed for the even larger and heavier A380-900 that never went anywhere beyond Catia.
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The wing does not use the spar for support. the spar has the landing gear on and is used to align it with the fusalge. Modern wings are a box structure they are not like older wings that had a rib and spar system.
I can be fixed mayby.
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Replaceable? No. Reparable? Depends on the extent, but even that's hard: the wings are full of hardware, and if you have to spend a year and invent a process for dismantling everything to get at the damage, it becomes financial infeasible. Even if you pull it off, you have new inspection requirements, operational limitations, etc.: it's not the same revenue generating plane after something like this.
There is a lot at stake. Emirates operates these with over 500 passengers. If that manifest burns to
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Re: Would a Spar be Repairable? (Score:1)
"That manifest"? What a crass phrase to describe people. You related to Bill Winters by any chance?
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Just slap on some Cylon organic resin [battlestarwiki.org]. Eventually it will infuse itself into the spar and act like cartilage.
Re:Would a Spar be Repairable? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Flextape can fix anything right!
Can't wait to see the new infomercial. We cut this Jet Liner in half!
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At this time, they do not even know whether they need to do anything about it. Your question is premature.
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Woah... Dumb question, but would a wing spar be repairable or replaceable?
Coward said, because when the wing falls off at 30,000 feet, rest assured - it's okay, because Airbus has good documentation. All fixed.
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Woah... Dumb question, but would a wing spar be repairable or replaceable?
Coward said, because when the wing falls off at 30,000 feet, rest assured - it's okay, because Airbus has good documentation. All fixed.
No, of course a broken spar is A Very Bad Thing when it happens in midair.
Is this changing-the-timing-chains-in-an-Audi difficult, or is this replacing-your-spinal-cord-without-killing-you impossible?
Are these planes repairable? I think it's a reasonable question.
(Of course, with the Audi, if has anything more than a loose gas cap it's not economically feasible to repair, but that's what you get with European engineering.)
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Well, during the Gulf War a Navy carrier based A6E Intruder landed on base that had a direct missile hit on its right wing (the BN probably shit himself!). The wing was mostly gone but the pilot still somehow made it to base. The plane was temporarily transferred to our Marine A6E squadron and the repairs got underway. Within 6 weeks that plane was flying again. If the spars can't be replaced I'm sure the entire wing assembly can, which is what we did on that damaged A6E. The question here is if the cost to
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That must have been the A6F we kept hearing about but never materialized. Are you sure it was Boeing? Grumman designed and manufactured the A6. Just as I was leaving the Marine Corps we were transitioning to F18 aircraft. As much as I loathed working on that flying pig you can't deny it was an awesome aircraft. It was sad to see the era of the A6 end.
"Emergency Airworthiness Directive" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an emergency but we'll get to it when we get to it...
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Yep. Grounding is done for Being-level bad, not for Airbus-level "maybe there is a problem". Also note that this is less than 10% of the A380 fleet.
Re:"Emergency Airworthiness Directive" (Score:5, Informative)
"It's very important and cannot be skipped, but the danger is not imminent" is a perfectly reasonable classification for risk. You used the word "emergency". They did not.
You would be amazed how many things continue to operate in this middle ground. Like an absurd number of bridges in the United States.
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"Emergency" refers to the bureaucratic regulatory process through which the AD is proposed, drafted, promulgated, and enforced. It is not necessarily saying that the urgency of the issue is immediate, just that it needs to be done unilaterally by the regulating agency faster than the typical AD process which can take a couple years with data collection phases, engineering phases, public comment phases, review/revision, etc.
As expected... (Score:1)
What's it made of? (Score:2)
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They won't be OceanGate-grade. They used PRCF that had already been rejected by quality control. That's a non-starter in aircraft.
Health and safety gone mad! (Score:1)
a380 concorde (Score:3, Interesting)
The A380 isn't really economical to fly, same problem as Concorde. It was already on the way out; this is probably the death knell.
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What does the A-380 have to do with the Panamax?
Is there some component of the aircraft that has to be shipped where the ability to put it on a sea going freighter actually imposes a size constraint?
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Re:a380 concorde (Score:5, Interesting)
The A380 is already out of production. The airlines that fly A380s really want more though. "Not economical" depends very much on what types of routes you fly and how much landing and takeoff slots cost at the airports you service.
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The A380 is already out of production. The airlines that fly A380s really want more though.
Not exactly. The airlines still interested in the A380 want an A380-neo (with new upgraded more efficient engines). Airbus has decided to not consider that option as the number of aircraft they would likely sell would not justify the engineering and certification costs (and perhaps, just incidentally, they would prefer those airlines to purchase a few A350-1000s rather than one A380-neo).
Re:a380 concorde (Score:4, Insightful)
this is probably the death knell.
The airbus A380 died 5 years ago. It hasn't been in production for a while. But your assertion that it isn't economical to fly is false. It very much is, but only on very selected routes, and there's only so much competition possible on those routes.
oh, so the A380 is a rare beast? (Score:2)
I never knew that. Those few certainly get around a lot.
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Apparently, about 250 are in use. Not so rare.
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Complete nonsense. This is an early safety measure which is the result of an abundance of caution. Calling this "casual insecurity" is insightless beyond belief. It is not even clear whether anything needs to be done at all, they just have found a potential problem and are looking at it.
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Well, what did I expect. Obviously you would try to defend a deeply stupid stance with a fallacy.
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You haven't watched and studied crashing commercial airplanes ... have you ....
Neither have you. You watched a bunch of youtube videos while pooping and got scared. What's your take on vaccines?
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Note that this is less than 10% of all A380 (Score:2)
And that the problem is not severe enough to mandate immediate inspection in all cases. Not comparable to the trash Boeing has been delivering.
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Hey, come on. When cracks were found in the MD-11 engine mount on several aircraft, Boeing looked into it, concluded a failure "would not result in a safety of flight condition," so there's no need for replacement but you might want to eyeball it every five years or so. The FAA was cool with it and everything was totally fine. Totally fine.
Okay, one engine fell off on one aircraft, but that was actually due to something else and it definitely wouldn't ever happen again.
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In their defence there was 15 years between Boeing identifying such cracks and an engine falling off.
Meanwhile... (Score:3)
Triple Seven Says Hold My Beer (Score:3)
Boeing 777 says hold my beer.
https://x.com/EBaviation/statu... [x.com]
I'm still struggling to accept that this is real. Too low. No flaps. Gotta be illegal... But all signs point to a crazy mother fucker.