Airline passenger news and views

European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has ordered all 68 Airbus A380 passenger jets to have their wings checked for cracks after Australian airline Quantas discovered defects in one of their aircrafts during a maintenance operation.

The Quantas' plane was checked for cracks after a flight affected by severe turbulences between London and Singapore. The world's biggest passenger aircraft with a capacity of 800 was found with 36 cracks on its wings.

Quantas said the cracks were not a consequence of the turbulence but due to "manufacturing issues."

"It must be extremely irritating to Qantas, but they appear to have taken appropriate precautionary action," director of safety at aviation consultancy Ascend Paul Hayes told the BBC.
"Although it must be said, these cracks seem like minor irritants. One would expect some teething troubles with any new aircraft," he added.

Only last month EASA ordered checks for 20 of these aircrafts after finding another type of cracks in the wings that could "potentially affect the structural integrity" of the A380s.
Cracks were found inside a A380 in 2010 for the first time. It was, again, a Quantas plane and it suffered a serious engine problem in Indonesia.

Following the latest EASA's announcement, an Airbus spokesperson said: "This is a continuation of the previous airworthiness directive, to include the aircraft that had not reached the flight cycle threshold."  The previous EASA's mandatory check was for planes with over 1,300 flights, but now they want to extend it to all aircraft in operation.

EASA's decision will considerably affect Emirates Airlines, which operates 20 Airbus A380s. Following the Dubai-based carrier are Singapore Airlines with 15 of these planes, Quantas with 12, Lufthansa eight, Air France six, Korean Air five and China Southern two.

This type of crack - dubbed as "type 2 crack" - affects to brackets that attach the wing ribs, and there are more than 2,000 of these brackets per wing.

It is suspected that the cracks were formed during manufacturing at the Airbus wing plant in Broughton, Wales.