34 COMPOSITE AIRCRAFT HANDLING
Dream or nightmare?
Boeing’s new baby has certainly garnered a disproportionate amount of press coverage over the last few months. But, as yet, no-one seems to have written much about its handling requirements, writes Alwyn Brice.
ooking back, the B787’s entry into service was arguably not any different from that of the A380. Like the much-trumpeted mammoth Airbus, which suffered a major wiring hiccough early on, something that resulted in production delays, the B787 has had its fair share of technical glitches: fuel and oil leaks, a cracked screen, electrical problems, an on- board fire, brake issues and batteries overheating (the somewhat prosaic term of “thermal runaway” being applied to this latter problem) have all been noted to date. For a commodity that has a price tag of around US$207m (that’s before any negotiation for multiple purchases starts), one might be forgiven for thinking that this purchase would be fit to fly upon delivery. Whilst it’s too easy to be flippant about this newcomer, the serious side of the B787 is quite simply that it’s new – and with all things new and innovative, teething troubles are not unexpected. Yes, whilst we’d all like to feel that the above-mentioned airliner comes with an operating guarantee, the fact
is that the combination of composite hull and a greater reliance on electrics have brought their own particular challenges. One imagines that those pioneers of wood and canvas probably looked askance at the invention of the aluminium fuselage: the story’s essentially the same, though… Batteries and electrical systems aside, the bigger question remains: how is this newcomer to be handled? There has been precious little in the popular press about the day-to-day realities of working alongside something that is largely plastic. After all, the material has been proved in other industries and is well up to the job compared with aluminium. It’s lighter, too, making the aircraft more economical to fly. Should, then, the handler be concerned?
Touch and go…
If you attended the GHI conference in Milan last November, you’ll have part of the answer already. There, Airbus dilated on its forthcoming composite airliner, the A350. Although Boeing has
GROUND HANDLING INTERNATIONAL APRIL 2013
around 50 787s operational already, Airbus has been slower off the mark but paradoxically, that later start may serve it well, given the teething troubles currently being experienced by its US rival. In Milan, a subsequent paper, given by Peter Bishop, looked at the performance of replicated panels placed under stress, stress that could be caused by a simulated GSE impact. The results were not encouraging: whilst a broad blunt impact (such as might be caused by the buffer on the end of beltloader) left no trace on the exterior of the panel, the panel’s interior was shown to suffer much more, to the point that frames and stringers were affected. Peter’s study was referred to as the Codamein, (the Composite Damage Metrics and Inspection), an EASA-funded research project. The problem, then, potentially lies out of sight: no-one handling a B787 (or, come to that, the forthcoming Airbus) appears able to easily determine the extent or results of an impact occasioned by GSE on the ramp. At least that was the impression imparted. At the conference, James Outram, of
Willis, asked the question on everyone’s lips: with unseen damage, could a handler safely clear an aircraft for take- off?
Airbus’s Peter Esteie admitted that inspection was an issue although in his view, a composite aircraft was no different from an aluminium one. Airbus had a tool under development to deal with this and felt that airports should be thinking about making inspection areas available for composite aircraft in the event of their requiring
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