A380 Wiring Problems: Technicians Flown In

[No Smoking]

Technicians flown in to overcome problems with Airbus A 380
03 July 2006 - AJS News

A trio of technicians crouched in the shell of an Airbus A380 look up and reply "Guten Tag!" to a greeting of "Bonjour!" and go back to their diagrams.

They are among dozens of extra specialists flown in from Hamburg to the Airbus assembly line in southwest France to help overcome problems in wiring Europe's superjumbo, the largest commercial aircraft ever built.

Working inside one of three disemboweled planes standing at work station 30, where aircraft are tested, they only have one task on their minds...........

The atmosphere inside the plant is otherwise eerily subdued for a firm in the throes of a crisis so serious that it caused a suspension of the French parliament and intensified a cross-border corporate power battle in France and Germany.

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.

The problems that stripped parent company EADS of a quarter of its share price earlier this month started with tiny displacements in wiring of as little as 5 centimetres.

They ended in a profit warning and in orders to slow the convoys of fuselage parts and wings hauled from Germany, Britain and Spain to Toulouse, a landlocked city chosen to assemble the A380 for political reasons as much as its aeronautical skills.

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 to complete.

At work station 30, an appreciation of the electrical issues begins as soon as you enter the plane, passing through what will be the first fully electrically operated doors on a large jet.

Wiring harnesses run mainly along the length of the plane, some in multi-colored bundles as thick as a human arm, others holding wispy signal cables barely bigger than a lock of hair.

Technicians examining wire tentacles dangling from the roof of each deck -- two for passengers and one for cargo -- need to check against two basic parameters they call functionality and geometry. Does the cable work and is it in the right place?

It would be more costly to pull out and replace wiring once it is hidden, so the jets have to be kept on the assembly line -- undignified creatures with blotches of green anti-corrosive paint and garish red noses -- until the wiring puzzle is solved.

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`Until the wiring puzzle is solved` - by German plumbers