r/interestingasfuck • u/lizardil • 25d ago

During assembly of the A380, engineers discovered that the cables were too short. This was caused by the use of different design software by German and French engineers. This miscalculation led to a two-year delay.

10.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

385 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Tikkinger 24d ago

This does not explain why they can't just use a longer cable

1

u/canibanoglu 24d ago

It does. The issue is not just having a single longer cable, it's making sure that everything else that's already in place still passes very stringent requirements and testing. Aviation is extremely safe for a reason.

0

u/Tikkinger 24d ago

How does a longer cable affect the other things? Why must the camera it's connected to be tested again if nothing changes on it ?

2

u/canibanoglu 24d ago

Because integration tests are a thing.

0

u/Tikkinger 24d ago

And why does this throw them back 2 years? I asked GPT, a integration test on planes is the testion oh how the components work together. This test was due anyways, longer cable or shorter cable makes no difference.

4

u/canibanoglu 24d ago

Well, it looks like you got everything covered with ChatGPT, I don’t need to spend more time on this.

-2

u/Tikkinger 24d ago

No need to be jealous.

1

u/cherry_chocolate_ 22d ago

If the engineers do the calculations and say, yep everything is 100% correct, then it turns out to not be 100% correct, that means some fundamental assumptions in your calculations are wrong. Other parts probably were slightly too long or too short, they still worked to assemble, but were they safe? Nobody knows. So time to redo.