Question: playing with plane wings must be fun but does it ever come to you that if you get your research wrong, a wing could break?

Paula answered on 9 Mar 2015:

Hi Tia,

Great question! Every job carries risks but you will often find in engineering in general that because our work affects everyone around us there are a lot of safety measures and regulations that we have to stick to to keep things safe. In the aerospace industry these standards are very high and are made by a lot of experienced engineers so I trust that they are adequate to keep everyone safe.

I will try to answer in a couple of points:
1) Wings are made up of so many components that in order to completely break a wing the majority of components would have to incur a series of failures from parts that are all linked. These parts are all under the influence of safety factors that well exceed the typical forces experienced on a single flight. I work on only a couple of components at a time and therefore even if one of those did incur failure then it would be almost impossible to break a whole wing because of it.
2) The regulations in the UK are extremely strict and a high standard of safety is maintained before any plane is certified as safe to fly so my work is checked by many experienced engineers before it makes it into the production line.
3) Each component is rigorously safety tested before it is classed as safe to fly so any issues are highlighted before it even gets into the air.
4) At the airport before a plane takes off and at regular maintenance intervals, an engineer looks around the plane to check that everything is ok before it takes off so the wings are continually being monitored to prevent anything going wrong in the air.
5) And finally, nothing is ever certain but without going into exact numbers, working with the mathematics behind the tolerances of these components reassures me that the parts can withstand loading far in excess of what they are designed to do.

Hope this answers your question?
Cheers,

Paula