Singapore is just over 6300 kilometres from Sydney by air. An A380 can fly well over twice that far. On today’s Qantas A380 flight from Singapore the 469 people aboard thought they would be travelling those 6300 kilometres to Sydney. This would not however be the case.
A small and seemingly insignificant manufacturing irregularity in one of the engines caused that engine to explode, requiring the enormous aircraft to return to Singapore airport where it would stay for over 15 months until repairs were completed.
Despite the aircraft being significantly damaged in the air, no one died that day, the aircraft landed without even an injury. 468 lives were saved by just one man - Captain Richard de Crespigny. This at least according to most commentators. It was hard to dig much deeper on the subject. Fortunately for an inquisitive mind, rescue came. Once again Captain de Crespigny saved the day ... he wrote a book on the incident.
Richard de Crespigny provides a fascinating insight into the world we inhabit. Most people have called the book boring. Most people probably did not make it to page 187.
As one of Airbus SAS’s over sixty thousand employees Seth Elliott loves his work. Seth is a part of a large team designing the wings that fly the 560 metric tonne A380. Getting a 560 tonne object into the air and keeping it there is a not inconsiderable undertaking. Despite being an engineer responsible for making it happen Seth still is blown away that it is even possible. He fails to see though that the tens of thousands of people suspended ten kilometres above the earth at any point in time are being kept aloft in large part by the proceeds of his years of dedicated study and resultant knowledge and considerable skill.
Like many large jet aircraft the A380 often flies close to the speed of sound. Therein lays a significant problem. A wing works in part by accelerating air over its top surface - meaning this air - relative to the aircraft itself, is travelling even faster than the speed of the aircraft through the surrounding air and meaning the air travelling over the wing sometimes goes supersonic. This can be dangerous.
Aeronautical engineers long ago worked out a solution to this problem. Rather than have the wing set at right angles to the fuselage as is the case with smaller aircraft and large but slower propeller driven aircraft, the wing is ‘swept’ back so that its wingtip is behind the wing root where the wing connects to the fuselage. The air still sometimes goes supersonic, but when it does this air ‘washes’ along the wing and is somewhat dissipated towards the wingtip, presenting much reduced danger to the integrity of the airframe.
While the general principle has long being worked out, the wing of the A380 is no ordinary wing. The A380 is a massive plane, but even proportionally speaking the A380’s wing is big compared to the aircraft. It is Seth and his teams job to consider the many factors involved in creating a substantially new wing
