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[Power Blog]
Wiring Design Faulted for Airbus A380 Production Delays
Sam Davis
ED Online ID #14634
- January 10, 2007
Engineering design of a superjumbo jet aircraft is anything but easy; the Airbus A380 aircraft designers can attest to that. You wouldn't expect a wiring problem to delay delivery of an airplane, but that is what has happened. Planes scheduled for delivery in 2006 may be up to two years late — some airlines have already cancelled their orders.
To understand why wiring is critical, you have to know that there are almost 1200 functions to control the plane, which takes 98,000 wires and 40,000 connectors. The digital design system has 500,000 models, and all those must be kept in sync by mismatched computer-design systems in different countries.
Further complicating aircraft design — nose sections are built in France, fuselages in Germany, wings in Great Britain and tails in Spain. Airbus' A380 aircraft sections will be transported on a special ship from sites in Broughton (UK), Hamburg (Germany), Puerto Real (Spain) and St. Nazaire (France) for final assembly in Toulouse (France).
As reported in the January 2007 IEEE Spectrum article "Manufacturing Mayday," by author Alexander Hellemans, designing the aircraft was much more difficult than anticipated. Engineers in Germany and Spain used the older V4 version of the CAD program to design the wiring whereas engineers in France and England used the newer V5 version. Although the software developer said the two versions were compatible, data was lost when transferring files from one system to the other. Another complication: the French were familiar with the software whereas the Germans did not have as much experience with it.
Because of the wiring design software compatibility issues, problems arose when incorporating wiring changes in the fuselage sections in Germany. "What happened in Germany certainly was not just a technical problem in the narrow sense," author Hellemans notes. "It was an execution failure." Nick Cunningham, an analyst at the Panmure Gordon & Co. brokerage firm in London said it was connected with "their lack of integration in engineering."
There was another point of view from John J. Nance (Tacoma, WA), who argued that the A380 delays were not really delays at all, in the strict sense of the word. He says the real problem was that the company underestimated the time it takes to develop a highly technical and complex product. "Selling the aircraft and promising delivery dates was a critical mistake," Nance maintains.
Another aspect of the aircraft's wiring is debatable. The wiring will use aluminum wire instead of copper; I assume this is to save weight. Mike Jahadi, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company's senior manager of CAD/CAM Integration and Strategic Planning, points out, "the aluminum wire would have to have an approximately 50% larger cross section depending on the alloys used. This would make the harnesses stiffer and harder to manage in tight spaces. However, if the increased stiffness was not accounted for in V4 software design (manageable bend radii which is a user-controlled setting in V4), then I could see where you could get into trouble. In V5 you can assign different material properties to the bundles to account for increased or decreased stiffness. If the vendor in Germany was doing the harness routing in V4 within a V5 digital mockup, I could see how that could also be a problem, since you cannot read V5 parts into V4 unless the V5 parts are converted."
In addition, there was continuing turmoil with Airbus management. Author Hellemans said there are doubts whether the company's problems were mainly technical, managerial, or political.
With all the problems associated with the design and production of the A380, would you be willing to fly on this airplane along with over 500 other passengers? Can you imagine the problems with boarding and leaving the aircraft, and retrieving luggage? And will there be enough restrooms? Also, I'm not convinced that aluminum wiring is safe — it was used in some California homes several years ago but was discontinued because of power-related problems.
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