Wiring Blamed for A380 Delay

[FlyingPhotog]

http://today.reuters.com/stocks/QuoteCompanyNewsArticle.aspx?view=CN&symbol=&storyID=2006-06-30T134819Z_01_L29896892_RTRIDST_0_TRANSPORT-EADS-WIRING-FEATURE-PICTURE.XML&pageNumber=0&WTModLoc=InvArt-C1-ArticlePage3&sz=13

Designed to produce four of the giant planes a month, the 125,000-square-metre plant is full with eight aircraft, and the just-arrived parts of the next jet are stacked like broken toys.

"It is like a blocked pipe in your house. Putting more in doesn't open it up immediately," Andreas Fehring, vice president of A380 programme management, says of the vast assembly line.

The problems that stripped parent company EADS (EAD.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) of a quarter of its share price earlier this month started with tiny displacements in wiring of as little as 5 centimetres.

...

In the plane, power and signal cables have to be a certain distance apart to avoid electro-magnetic interference. Cables also are strapped together in bundles called harnesses.

When testing shows that shaking or movement in flight may shift a cable close enough to another to cause interference, that cable must be moved.

Since there is no slack in the plane's 500 km of wiring, changing the position of one cable could require a cascade of changes in the positions of other cables or a whole new harness.

Multiply that by the number of aircraft already assembled -- 13 excluding the two built solely for static testing -- and changes can take thousands of hours of labour to complete.

(long article, very interesting! Continues on...)

[Greg]

It's interesting that they didn't spend more time on the wiring initally. Also it's interesting to look at the graph of the EADS share price on the left of that article.

-Greg

[DAL767-400ER]

Yup, and all of this is only the fault of the German plant according to Foregeard . Good thing he was told to STFU on this topic.

[chrisburns]

Yup, and all of this is only the fault of the German plant according to Foregeard . Good thing he was told to STFU on this topic.

And we all know what happened the last time the French complained about the Germans LMFAO

[ATLcenter]

And we all know what happened the last time the French complained about the Germans LMFAO

Note: discussing this is valid as long as no one mentions the Maginot Line was a failure. As many Frenchmen will attest, it wasn't a failure. It just wasn't long enough.

Foregeard seems to be more of a liability than an asset to Airbus as of late! He's making the company look like it's run by loons, which may very well not be the case. I understand that if something goes wrong, no one wants to take the blame, but this is getting out of hand!

Also good to know the good engineers watch football on the job After all, that's important too!

[DAL767-400ER]

And we all know what happened the last time the French complained about the Germans LMFAO

Yup, the UK and US had to save their French a$$es .