During the corona pandemic, all airlines had shut down their fleet of Airbus A380s, this year the A380 made its comeback. Most recently, Lufthansa and Ethiad announced that they would bring their double-deckers back into the air from deep sleep.
But there are currently problems with older models of the A380 in particular: technicians from Emirates, currently the largest operator of the four-engine aircraft with 84 A380s, have discovered cracks in the wing spars. The wing spar is the supporting component of an aircraft wing, i.e. the wing.
There are currently four machines on the ground. One machine is with the manufacturer in Toulouse (France), three in the maintenance halls in Dubai. “Airbus has sent around 60 engineers to Dubai to deal with the problem,” Tim Clark, President of Emirates Airline, told industry portal Aviation Week. “Airbus is in the process of fixing everything. We have to have the spars reworked in various areas.” The work takes around a week per aircraft.
An A380 at Dusseldorf Airport
Clark emphasizes: “At the moment it is not a safety problem, we are far from it.” But he announced an additional inspection program for Emirates for the wing spars. As early as 2019, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and Airbus had stipulated that the wings of all A380s must be inspected after 15 years. After cracks were recently discovered in 20 younger aircraft, this interval is reduced to 12.5 years.
EASA has identified other problems with the return to service of decommissioned A380s. In an airworthiness directive that came into effect on November 15, the agency ordered that some of Collins’ evacuation slides that have been in storage for more than 185 days must be replaced. Reason: In some tests, the seams of the escape slides had opened. An Airbus A380 has 16 of these slides, eight on each side, three on the upper deck and five on the lower deck.
In the summer of 2023, the A380 with the baptismal name “Düsseldorf” will fly again
In the summer of 2023, Lufthansa wants to put its first reactivated A380 back into service from Munich, with three more giant jets to follow by October.