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Old 14th March 2006 | 12:56
  #8 (permalink)  
Gillegan
 
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 185
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From: In the State of Perpetual Confusion
Given that weight is such an important design element of an aircraft, ideally you would want the wing to fail at 150.00001 % of its design load. If it fails at 160%, you are probably carrying excess weight. I wouldn't be surprised if Airbus was purposely cutting their margins very fine in order to save weight. If the wing failed within a few percent of the target and if the results did indeed validate their finite element computer model then I would think that while structural modifications would definitely be required, a retest would not.
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