Air Industry Faces Public's Pereception of Safety PARIS - When Airbus disclosed last month that it had discovered dozens of hairline cracks in a wing component of several of its A380 jets, the news set off a flurry of worrying headlines and digital missives that ricocheted through the Twitterverse. "World's largest passenger plane may be unsafe," the BBC reported on its Web site. "Airbus in damage control," The Daily Telegraph of Australia announced. Wing and a prayer? The Associated Press wrote, apparently unable to resist an ominous pun. The fact that those cracks did not, in the view of aviation regulators or independent safety experts, pose an imminent safety risk was duly noted in most of those reports. But the impression of a potential emergency lingered nonetheless. Episodes like this are nothing new in aviation, industry executives said. Particularly with new planes - like the A380, which entered commercial service in 2007, or the Boeing 787 "Dreamliner," which carried its first passengers last year - the discovery of design weaknesses and performance issues is quite common in the early months and years of an aircraft's life and form part of a well-worn pattern that dates from the early days of flight. What has changed dramatically, however, is the availability of this type of information for a public that until quite recently heard from the air safety community only in the wake of a dramatic incident or, worse, a crash. That may come as slight comfort to air passengers, many of whom struggle to place in context dispatches on the latest possible problem with a plane they are scheduled to fly on next week. Yet industry executives, regulators and safety advocates emphasize that aircraft are more closely scrutinized today than ever before. "Every aircraft that goes into service has something that crops up that's unforeseen," said Kevin Hiatt, chief operating officer of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. Every new airframe, or even an engine or a component, goes through a process of breaking itself in. It is an oversight process that still unfolds largely within the confines of maintenance hangars and test beds, involving teams of engineers, mechanics and designers who scour millions of hours of flight data in search of anomalies that might one day develop into a concern over performance or safety. "No industry is more comprehensively overviewed as aviation," said David Learmount, operations and safety editor at Flight International magazine. That has been the case since the Second World War. Both Airbus and Boeing, which build the majority of the world's large passenger planes, said they received tens of thousands of service messages each year from airlines, of which only a fraction were related to safety issues. In 2011, for example, Airbus recorded about 80,000 of these service events, ranging from the discovery of the A380 wing bracket cracks, to a landing-gear tire wearing out before it should have or even a mechanic falling from a ladder. Boeing, which did not provide data for any specific years, said it typically logged 100,000 to 200,000 such reports annually. An overwhelming majority of such incidents are the result of actions by flight crews or maintenance staff and are unrelated to airworthiness, the companies and regulators said. But a small percentage do warrant deeper investigation. Airbus said that last year it identified about 1,700 such incidents, just over 2 percent of the total. Boeing said it classified around 2,000 events each year as "reportable" to regulators, equivalent to 1 percent to 2 percent of all occurrences. More than 95 percent of these more significant issues are ultimately addressed with a proposed technical or procedural modification, which is communicated directly to the airlines and their maintenance providers, both Boeing and Airbus said. A full analysis of the problem is also provided to safety regulators, but it is still up to the airline to decide whether, and when, to make the recommended inspections or repairs.