I still don’t get it. Airbus says that the wire bundles did not match up because the Hamburg plant was using a different version of Catia (V4). This does not make any sense at all because the plane fitted together even though some parts were designed using the Catia V4 wireframe formulas in Germany and the other parts were made in France using volume formulas (Catia V5). This means that they did get the parts to fit because the planes are obviously flying. It also means that the wire raceways are probably also correctly sized. So why didn’t the wires fit? Changing from copper to aluminum should not be a big showstopper. Catia V4 and V5 have nothing to do with this issue so let’s stop bringing it up as a reason for the A380 delay. I am quite familiar with both Catia products. Neither version handles wiring. You need additional software tools to do this and I don’t know if it even exists let alone works with Catia. Something else is going on here that we just don’t know about.

There is another consideration that most of you seem to miss, and this is the number of connectors between bundles. When you design wiring you try to make the bundles manageable by locating the wiring panels at convenient and serviceable locations. This helps in fault isolation and replacement. But the more panels and connectors, the higher the resistance in the wire and it also generates a lot more weight and heat. If airbus decided to run vary long bundles that go across sections and not to panels they may be getting into some serious design and servicability problems. It might also explain the present mess. I suspect that they are actually redesigning some stuff.

If we could just get hold of the schematics and wire diagrams for the A380 a lot of these questions could be answered. But I suspect that these documents do not yet exist.