Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

An Airbus A380 structural failure during wing static tests in France last week do not mean Asian Aerospace 2006 visitors are in any danger when the new very-large airliner flies here today. Airbus is confident that large modifications will not be needed, although officials concede that “some slight improvements” might be required.

Rupture of the wing very near the end of static tests came after a successful demonstration of the A380’s ability to tolerate the design limit load–the maximum normally expected to occur during operations. Subsequently, testing of the first completed wingset to the computed ultimate load (the limit load plus 50 percent) progressed until the test specimen was within about three percent of the expected limit. At that point, with the test specimen deflected to the point where the tips were more than 24 feet above their normal unloaded position both wings suffered cracks simultaneously at a point between the engines. 

Airworthiness approval standards set by the European Aviation Safety Agency require manufacturers to demonstrate that ultimately there is a factor of 50 percent between forces likely to be experienced in normal service and the actual load the wing will bear. Load targets are worked out using finite element loads, which in this case were sufficiently accurate to estimate the point of failure within 3 percent. 

Since manufacture of the initial wingset used in the tests, Airbus has refined the design, which will be slightly different on production rigs as a result of continued development, according to the European manufacturer. One factor may have been that earlier A380 weight-saving exercises had left no margin for error in the formal static load tests. 

Here at AA2006, Airbus said it was satisfied with the now-completed tests. The company is happy that on the basis of precise measurements and their correlation to computed predictions the wing has demonstrated the required performance. Officials accept that “some fine tuning” may follow analysis of test results.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

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