X45

Aircraft Wing Construction: How are wings attached to the aircraft body? How can they withstand the stress?

Consider a huge aircraft like the Boeing 747 - when it takes off it weighs hundreds of tonnes and the wings also have the engines on them! How are the wings made so strong and how are they attached to the main fuselage? Are they welded or bolted on? I know that for eg. An Airbus the wings are shipped as separate parts that are assembled together with all the other components that make up the entire plane, so they are attached separately!

Public Comments

1. Yeah they basically just use huge bolts.
2. large commerical aircraft have the wings bolted to the main spar that goes thru the fuselage
3. Wing construction is similar in all types of aircraft. In modern aircraft, wings are usually all metal. Older planes had wings made of wood and fabric. Wings need to be able to maintain their shape under the high degree of stress encountered in flight. They consist basically of a framework chiefly of spars, ribs, and sometime stringers. Spars are the structural elements that ultimately bear the load carried by the wing. Spars run the length of the wing from the point nearest the fuselage out to the wing tip. Most wings have two spars-the front spar and the rear spar, but some wings may have as many as five. The leading edge (the front of the wing) and the trailing edge (the rear of the wing) are additional structural components that run roughly parallel to the spars. The ribs cross the spars and extend between the leading and trailing edges of the wing. The forming ribs support the wing covering and give the wing its shape. Compression ribs also bear the flight stress. Stringers are found on some planes. They run the length of the wing and may be above or below the spars and ribs. A skin covers the framework. Wings can be attached to the aircraft fuselage in different ways, depending on the strength of a wing's internal structure. The cantilever wing structure is the strongest. It is attached directly to the fuselage without any external, stress-bearing structures. The semicantilever wing has one or two supporting wires or struts extending between each wing and the fuselage. The externally braced wing, typically found on a biplane, has a number of struts and flying and landing wires.
4. They are attatched by elastoplasts & held on by your prayers.
5. If I told you how few bolts it really takes to attach an airplane wing to the fuselage, you'd never get on another airplane in your life. Believe me... You'd rather not know.
6. The main spar or beam that forms the wing is continuous & the fusalage sits on it. the main stress is when its properly loaded in flight thats why the wing sags when on the ground.
7. Almost all of the answers above are correct. But the key is the WingBox. In large aircraft it is the single heaviest structure component of the plane. On an F14 the wingbox was 1/2 the weight of the rest of the structural components and was made out of titanium. And Yes a whole bunch of bolts/washers/safety wire. But the wing box is the real key.
8. Somewhere over the last 100 years, engineers have learned how strong wings need to be and how to attain that strength even with attachment joints. Typically these joints are designed with safety factors greater than the rest of the wing structure, so they are the least likely place for a wing to fail. If there were really a problem, airplanes would be falling out of the sky on a daily basis! PS: I helped design th F-14 and can tell you for sure the wing box is only about 10% of the structural weight of the airplane. No single element is the 'key'; they all work together toward the desired result.
9. How can they withstand the stress? Well obviously the wings have to be strong, but they also have to be flexible. Ever looked out at a wing in bad weather & see it flapping up & down. Well in many cases, if it did not do this it would just break off.
10. Each wing is attached to the fuselage with rivets, several thousand per wing.
11. the wings are attached to the fuselage at load carrying members called spars.