It is worse than even that:

> Within the space of four seconds, the energy from the annulus gas flow accelerated the IP turbine past its critical speed, until centrifugal forces exceeded the ultimate strength of the nickel alloy disk. The red-hot, wildly spinning disk instantly fractured into several sections, which rocketed outward in multiple directions at incomprehensible speed.

I admit that I glossed over the section on the machining of the oil pipe, but the facility appears to bear most of the blame.

These were pulled and scrapped from the whole A380 fleet.

"Investigators also criticized the culture within the Hucknall facility that manufactured the HP/IP bearing hubs, identifying signs of complacency and widespread procedural non-compliance. A paperwork review showed that the required signatures were missing from 131 out of 138 retrospective concessions issued between 2009 and 2011, and a large number of minor non-conformances had not been properly handled through the normal chain of command."

> Jet fuel cannot be stored in the wings in this zone.

TFA describes a fuel leak resulting from a piece of the turbine disk passing through a fuel tank located within the wing:

"When the fragments of the IP turbine disk passed through the wing and belly of the A380, they caused considerable secondary damage along the way, not only to the №2 engine but also to the left wing fuel tank, which sprang a leak"

It also includes a photo of the inside of the damaged wing tank.

Was the requirement you describe added after this incident?

What's a turbine disc?

But it seems to me that the whole failure could have been prevented with a bunch of temperature sensors spread throughout the engine, and a good anomaly detection system.

Watching Mayday on flights is one of my favorite things to do for some odd reason.

I got an impression from the text that pilots were not sure the fuel levelling line does not have a leak itself. Maybe they were afraid the line can leak fuel into fuselage somehow?

per the article, because the stub pipe counter bore had to be drilled after that end of the pipe was welded in place, so directly measuring pipe wall thickness wasn't practical

Difficulty in measuring since it was machined after installation?

Context to the lawsuit brought up by Go2Sky: https://avherald.com/h?article=53c8958a

The plane was a significant factor but you really shouldn't look past the calibre of expertise in the cabin on this particular flight.

> 5 pilots were in the cockpit of this flight. In addition to the normal crew of pilot-in-command and co-pilot, there was an experienced relief pilot and two additional check captains; one was being trained as a check captain (CC) and the supervising CC, who was training the CC.

Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny had 35 years of flying experience at the time of the incident.

That is an insane amount of flight experience in the cockpit and all of the reports state this was a very significant factor. i.e by allowing distribution of the task load, plenty of time for one of the pilots to compute landing calculations manually etc.

THe A380 is a flying tank no doubt, but it wasn't the sole factor here - I think most people would agree this one was a shared victory.

Like Boeing, there was organizational dysfunction leading to a direct safety issue.

During the development of the A380, the German and French sides were using different versions of the CATIA PLM software (i.e. CAD), which prevented people from looking at a single unified model of the plane. One concrete problem it caused was major problems with the wiring harnesses, which led to a 2 year delay in the program, and 3 early A380's which couldn't be sold. (Airbus kept one for test, the other two got sent to museums)

That manifested in this accident because the wing wiring was routed through the engine disk burst axes (a hazard which is explicitly accounted for) with insufficient redundancy. That created the dangerous situation where they couldn't turn off the engine after landing.

Read about the AF447 Rio-Paris crash. Input stick averaging?? That's a huge design mistake which contributed to the crash and AFAIK is still here..

An aviation thread with two utterly ignorant posts - [0]. Is that the aviation knowledge level of HN?

[0] - this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541946

Airbus is French, German and British. Not just French.

I thought this was a strange insertion of geopolitics into the conversation so I checked out this account’s comment history. It’s good for others to see that some commenters here have a serious axe to grind and are not really “hackers” as their primary interest here. The most recent comments in order:

> [something about london taxi drivers, admittedly unrelated]

> I totally get you and in theory you are right. And yet, in the USA you have gerrymandering and apparently _wanted_ Trump. Twice. Something has to be very wrong somewhere.

> I would suggest "lobbying" is not the correct word to describe all the corruption going on in the current USA administration cesspool.

>I recently bought a BambuLab 3D printer. Designed and made in China. Right from the unpacking to first print the experience was top Apple-style quality. Indeed I was agreeably surprised.

> A global non USA success? Plenty. You might want to remove your pink USA glasses and look around. Spotify good enough for you?

> I am Canadian. Never, ever would i knowingly buy any dairy products from the USA , at any price. We have cows too, and farmers.

> Its not that it hates its customers , as much as it it a USA-based company that is run under the rules made by the administration. Not that much different from running Red Star OS from North Korea, actually.

> [Finally something unrelated]

A new A380 is more expensive (rule of thumb half of official list price, so about $220 million), and airlines were not talking about retiring A380s yet at the time. So it even made economic sense.

They paid an estimated $300M per aircraft, so even a $139M repair bill is worth it

Please don’t post off-topic hearsay like this here. This article isn’t about maintenance, it’s about a manufacturing fault and the incredible work by the pilots to avert a colossal aviation disaster. Qantas continues to have an unblemished record of safety. Running airlines cost-effectively is a continually growing challenge. There is always a place for scrutiny of airlines’ maintenance and safety practices, but introducing it out of context and basing entirely on a comment from an unidentified individual is not a helpful contribution to this discussion.

Despite this, Qantas is consistently rated one of the top 3 safest airlines in the world every year.

Ah yeah, China Eastern..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Eastern_Airlines_Flight_...

Meanwhile Lufthansa had their last fatal crash in 1993. For British it was in 1976.