Australian made

The A380’s wingtips & fences

Every time an A380 is delivered to an airline from Airbus’s Hamburg or Toulouse delivery centres, it carries a little piece of Australia on the end of each wing. All of the aircraft’s wingtips and wing fences are manufactured at Boeing’s Hawker de Havilland (HdH) facility at Bankstown Airport in Sydney.

To date, the HdH team has delivered 46 shipsets comprising 92 wingtips and 184 two-piece wing fences to Airbus facilities in Broughton in the UK, and Toulouse in France. “A shipset is a pair – two wingtips, and on each wingtip there’s two wing fences, an upper and a lower fence,” HdH’s Bankstown site manager, Michael Sorenson, told Australian Aviation. “The first contracted run is for around 100 shipsets, and we’re increasing our production rate as things ramp up in Toulouse. ” HdH won the wingtip and wing fence contract in 2001 after two years’ of precontract and concept work. “We were doing a lot of at-risk work and we were competing with a lot of people at that time,” Sorenson said. “Airbus has a situation where they have a series of bidders, and they go through two or three gates to whittle it down to two bidders, and we signed a contract in 2001. And then we went ahead through a detailed design phase, manufacture, and then into production. ” “We had two engineers at Airbus in the UK, and we had a rotation of people,” added Nicholas Cale, lead design engineer.