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Airbus A380 Wings Fly, 2 Years Early!

Ged Mason and the Internal Wing Transportation Jig Imagine a two-storey plane standing 24m high, over 70m long and almost 8om wide. It’s sitting at the end of the runway, weighing over 500 tonnes, with 555 passengers on board, ready to fly up to 15,000 km. Four enormous engines are ready to launch the Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger plane, on its maiden flight the most fuel-efficient aircraft ever conceived.

You’ll have to wait until 2006 to see this extraordinary plane enter service, but each of the wings destined for the first batch of aircraft has already ‘flown’ on Solving Movers at the Airbus factory in Broughton, England. This factory has produced many of the wings for Airbus’s family of aircraft, and the A380 wing is their largest.

Measuring 40m long and weighing almost 40 tonnes, these are actually the largest wings ever manufactured for any civil aircraft.

How can the wing be moved?

At he new custom-built A380 wing facility Airbus was faced with the task of moving these giant wings from the assembly area through inspection and into the paint plant. The original scheme comprised a wheeled Mover running on rails in the floor. With the combined weight of the raft and wing expected to be around 80 tonnes, this method was going to impose high point loadings on the concrete floor, and would have created obstructions to personnel and other traffic. An air-film Mover concept, which spreads the load evenly over large ‘air bearings’ was considered, and Solving was brought in to develop the idea further.

In co-operation with Morson Projects, experts familiar with wing handling, Solving supplied an air film Mover system to enable a single operator to manoeuvre the wing ‘sideways’ from one stage to another with extreme accuracy and safety.

Precision and safety

The ‘raft’ built by Morson Projects contains eight Solving modules, two electrical drives and an optical guidance system. An onboard control centre receives instructions from the operator’s hand- held radio control console, and three further radio-controlled e-stops are held by lookouts, stationed at each end of the wing. The optical guidance system ensures extreme accuracy is maintained throughout the transport process, and a manual override is available should the raft be required to move to other areas.

The floor on which the Mover operates is entirely clear of any obstructions, and the option is available to drive or rotate the Mover in any direction if required. Apart from the low floor loadings, the Solving device is easy to operate, quiet and user-friendly. It requires little maintenance, and provides Airbus with a solid, stable measuring raft when the air bearings are deflated (unlike a wheeled platform which requires a braking system to avoid movement).

Airbus Tooling Engineer, Alan Minshull, is pleased with the development: “Solving and Morson Projects have worked with Airbus as a team to ensure all our requirements are fully understood and appreciated. The largest commercial wings in the world are now able to fly before they are even attached to an aircraft!”

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