Singapore Airlines says the costs of inspecting and repairing cracks found on parts of the giant A380's wings will be borne by Airbus which designs the wings for all its commercial aircraft at Filton.
Cracks were found on four Singapore Airlines planes inspected up until yesterday – and one of the jets is already back in service after repair.
Inspection on six other A380s operated by the airline will be completed by tomorrow.
Initially, hairline cracks discovered in some A380 wings in late December were thought to be not very serious, with Airbus calling for fixes only at four-year checks but then a second series of bigger cracks around the central part of the wing were discovered and European air safety regulators ordered inspections of 20 of the double-decker planes, six within four days, and the rest within six weeks.
It has emerged that the cracks are due to the choice of a less flexible aluminium alloy used to make wing brackets, the manner in which fasteners are put through holes and the stresses involved in fitting portions of the wing together. Each set of wings has around 4,000 wing-rib feet which attach the wing’s upper and lower skins to ribs running throughout the wing although only a small number of brackets on any given plane have cracks.
However, the ribs aren’t the primary load-carrying structure, which is handled by the front and rear spars, or long beams that run through the plane’s wing, and the skins, said Tom Williams, head of Airbus programs.
“It’s not a massive issue,” Nick Cunningham, an analyst at London-based Agency Partners, told Bloomberg. “They just need to put the fix in place, execute it and move on,” he said.
