A350 Fuselage coating cracks
 

Does anyone have more information on this? A Qatar Airways’ Airbus A350-900, registered A7-ALL, was ferried to Shannon Airport (SNN) in Ireland, on November 13, 2020. There, aviation painting company International Aerospace Coatings (IAC) was supposed to give it a special livery to celebrate the 2022 FIFA World Cup to be held in Qatar.

However, after the original livery was removed, cracks in the fuselage were reportedly found in the composite (CFRP) fuselage. It should now be ferried to Airbus headquarters in Toulouse for inspection and repairs.

https://www.aerotime.aero/26851-crac...qatar-a350-xwb

I'll be interested to see how close to the tail the cracks were found.


https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....1477ee4f38.jpg

re the ground strike, it was evidently on the left elevator.
Serious incident Airbus A330-343 9M-XXC, 07 Jul 2018 (aviation-safety.net)
There is a link to the accident investigation than can be downloaded as a pdf file.

What has this ground incident got to do with the Qatar A350 reg A7-ALL? Has this A350 been involved with any unusual incdents? We need some information from Airbus.

Surely the relevance is obvious. It was the other aircraft involved in the incident as per the report.

Apologies to one and all, I should have read the report rather than just looking at the headlines. But we still need information from Airbus.

Just saw that the aircraft was ferried to TLS today and actually flew at FL410. I am curious about what kind of cracks they’ve found.
Surely it wasn’t structeral.

If the cracks were in the rear fuselage, they may have been outside the pressure hull.

"The issue is superficial / cosmetic and only visible when the top coat of paint is stripped. It is not a structural composite issue."

Interesting to see what Airbus will come back with - it was ferried from Shannon to Toulouse yesterday.

This has escalated.

I’m unable to post links but Google “Qatar A350” for news of 13 hulls grounded.

Ap news has the following story
https://apnews.com/article/middle-ea...ae6aaa15982317

"Following the explicit written instruction of its regulator, 13 aircraft have now been grounded."

Yeah, right.

Seems a bit fishy to me. Perhaps if EASA or the FAA had ordered the withdrawal from service......We will no doubt see in a few days if other regulators follow suit.

This is not a safety related issue. Qatar's main issue is that the cracks are appearing too early in the life cycle of the plane. They are now in discussion (argument) with Airbus over the way forward. They feel the aircraft are aging too quickly.

End of story. This sort of thing happens between manufacturers and their customers all the time. Qatar is just using the regulator and the media to add more pressure on Airbus to resolve.

OK, so there are two threads about what appears to be the same issue

https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/...ght=A350+paint

As stated in the other thread, considerable feeling that this is Qatar looking to extract $$'s from Airbus.

Reading between the lines- the Arabs are running out of oil and gas, they have too many aircraft, not enough customers and fishing for a free feed from Airbus.....

This could be a number of things...there is a skim coat applied to the aircraft to smooth it all out prior to painting...cracks in this coating can translate to surface cracks in the composite material.
It may be something as simple as sanding off the skim coat and re-application of a different kind of skimcoat....

I fly a composite GA aircraft , much smaller, not the speed of an 350/787 of course, but cracks in the surface are not uncommon because the 2K paint typically used is not exactly as flexible as the composite it covers. Not nice to look at and needs repair as moisture gets into the cracks, but not really a safety issue. But I do not know which paint /primer they use on 350s/787s.one would expect they had an engineering solution to this as this phenomenon is known.

It looks like EASA does not agree with the QCAA actions
 

Qatar A350: EASA Taking No Action (at this time)! - Mentour Pilot

“Based on the data provided to EASA, there is no indication that the paint and protection degradation affects the structure of the aircraft or introduces other risks, and so EASA is not intending to take any action as State of Design for this issue at this time. No other airlines have reported paint and protection damage.”

And also this https://www.airlinerwatch.com/2021/0...on-airbus.html

Singapore have 55 with no problems detected