Alcoa Helps the Airbus A380 Make Its First Flight

From Business Wire: Alcoa announced that the successful first flight of the Airbus A380, the most significant commercial airliner to be introduced in the last 50 years, took with it more new Alcoa products and solutions than any other aircraft in Alcoa's 100+ years of aviation history.

Together, Airbus and Alcoa have made new horizons in air travel possible through engineering and collaborative problem solving. Alcoa's advanced metallic solutions for the A380 include:

• New alloys that add strength and durability to wings and fuselage
• The largest, high-strength, fatigue-resistant upper and lower wing skins ever produced
• The largest, most damage-tolerant fuselage sheet ever made;
• The largest ever wing spar and new landing gear forgings that will hold up under the pounding of a lifetime of takeoffs and landings;
• New multi-material lockbolts for the assembly of the plane's center wing box.

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