Aircraft Industry: Airbus A380 wing flaw undetected for a decade

Airbus said efforts to lower the weight of the world’s largest airliner lay behind recent A380 wing cracks and pledged to learn from mistakes that lay dormant for a decade, as repair costs looked set to climb toward 500 million euros.

EADS subsidiary Airbus reported the cracks in January, leading to checks on the worldwide fleet of A380s, which authorities say are safe to fly.

Airbus chief executive Tom Enders said the discovery inside the superjumbo’s wings, where new lightweight carbon-composite materials and traditional metal meet, showed the difficulty of pushing technical boundaries in the ultra-competitive industry.

The A380 was designed in the early part of the last decade. At the time, the aircraft needed to lose weight, in part because of efforts to make it quieter, which required larger and heavier engine fans.
To drive down weight, a decision was made to mix metal and lightweight carbon components inside the wings, but engineers could not tell how this would stand up to extreme temperatures.

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