"Garcia says that the FEM calculations had already established that the A380’s wing had “no margin at ultimate load. We had a weight saving programme and ‘played the game’ to achieve ultimate load.” However in earlier briefings, Airbus structural engineers had stated that it planned to carry out “a residual strength and margin research test” in 2006 after completing ultimate load trials."
They were going for Ultimate Load. They admit to not having margin in achieving that load, and they missed it. Their design was not adequate to survive *static* load test, dynamic testing will be worse.
My understanding was that the ultimate load was 1.5x the maximum use load. To me that is a 50% margin of safety in every day use.
But yea, in either case, it does look bad. Fortunately they're not likely to sell many of those monsters anyway. The 7E7's got their butts kicked.