Originally Posted by
Ian W
It is surprisingly similar to the
A-380 wing structure test "The wing of the Airbus A380 static test specimen suffered a structural failure below the ultimate load target during trials in Toulouse earlier this week, but Airbus is confident that it will not need to modify production aircraft." The aircraft was still certified by EASA without repeating the test and you are all happy to fly (on) A-380s.
Thanks for the heads up.
To be fair, one must quote the entire paragraph :
However Garcia says that the failure of the wing below the 1.5 target will require “essentially no modifications” to production aircraft: “This static test airframe has the first set of wings built, and we have refined the structural design for subsequent aircraft due to increased weights etc. We will use this calibration of the FEM to prove the adequacy of the structure on production aircraft.”
They say they have "refined" the structure of the production aircraft, utilizing this test on a pre-prod wing to calibrate their calculations.
Nobody will reproach a failed test to Boeing, except maybe this was to be a demonstration that the previous tests had succeeded.
Also it comes at an unfortunate time, with many other quality/engineering issues cropping up.