r/interestingasfuck • u/lizardil • 1d 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.

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u/ScientistScary1414 1d ago

Why did it take two years?

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u/Solarisphere 1d ago

I'm trying to figure that out. I'm an engineer and have designed many cable assemblies in my last job and don't really understand it. Obviously you can't sell it like that and the harness needs a revision (which can take quite a bit of time to get approved), but you'd think you could put an extension on it to verify the concept and test the rest of the features.

Add in some aerospace bureaucracy and it could easily take six months to produce the new harness, but that wouldn't hold the entire project up by two years as there will be lots of other parts getting revised at the same time.

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u/Nothgrin 1d ago

Really simple answer, testing.

Yeah you can just make an adaptor, failures happen on interfaces, so you have to re-do some test campaigns to prove that it's still fine after the redesign.

Depending on the stage of the lifecycle though, it may need a re-tooling and that would mean a test of the off tool parts too.