[Gay State Conservative]

IIRC,the oldest A380s are about 10 years old. Cracks in the wings? Sounds like Boeing isn't the *only* one with problems.

[mad_as_he$$]

“The Dubai-based carrier has 111 A380s in its fleet.”

Dang! Moving 500 bodies per trip? That’s a lot of folks moving around by air.

[minnesota_bound]

Some duct tape will fix this.

[norwaypinesavage]

"Airbus said the safety of the aircraft was not affected."

Riiiiight. And since the wing spar isn't necessary, why put it there in the first place?

[JPG]

We don need no stinkin' wings!

[vetvetdoug]

Think about the KC-135’s and the B-52’s that were made in the early 1950’s. They X ray the wings for stress cracks monthly.

[butlerweave]

Are the wings still made in the UK ?

[avenir]

Speed tape. I use it to do in-field patching of ULD’s that have tears, punctures, holes, etc. That stuff will slice your finger open.

[null and void]

One dirty little secret is that modern FEA (Finite Element Analysis, a technique to simulate stresses and strains on a part’s design) based designs of all modern artifacts from buildings to bridges to cars and aircraft, allows the engineers to satisfy the business needs of reducing the materials used in anything to a bare minimum.

Good for cost and weight savings.

In the olden days parts were over-designed, and quite robust.

A DC-3 was so ‘over-designed’ that the were able to demonstrate how strong the wings were by running a steam roller over a wing without damaging it!

As a result, DC-3 (and the C-47 cousins) have survived amazing levels of abuse. From flying over The Hump, to the Berlin airlift where one plane had been given twice the maximum design load of coal by mistake.

Without FEA, classic designs were made from knowing what had failed, and designing the parts twice as strong and then adding a safety margin!

Modern designs have a certain elegance, and are more economical to purchase and operate, but are run much closer, but still not too close (mostly...) to their limits.