I am telling you right now that I will not fly on any Airbus product. They are manufactured by lazy people in socialist nations that sleep more then they work. JD

The cracks in brackets inside the wings of the jumbo Airbus A380 “do not pose a safety risk,” the plane builder said Monday.

“We can confirm minor cracks have been found and these are in non-critical sections of the wing rib,” Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon told the Star from Toulouse, France.

A spokesman for Australian aircraft engineers has demanded that the entire Qantas fleet be grounded for a thorough inspection. The cracks on a Qantas Airbus A380 were found during a major overhaul in Singapore that followed a mid-flight engine blowout last November, Qantas said. The cracks were repaired.

“We can’t continue to gamble with people’s lives and hope they make it until their four-year inspection,” said Steve Purvinas, federal secretary for the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association.

“It sounds dramatic, but they’re not on the wing,” said Dubon. “They’re on a little L-shaped bracket inside the wing. It’s a hairline crack, but the bracket is still intact and still doing its job. They’re not load-bearing.”

Air France flies its A380 planes into Montreal; Air Canada has none in its fleet.

Dubon emphasized that the European aviation safety authority had supported Airbus’s decision to deal with the cracks during the aircrafts’ routine maintenance every four years.

Singapore International Airlines also discovered the cracks last year and has repaired them, a company spokesman said.

“These pose no safety issue and repairs were carried out on the aircraft,” SIA spokesman Nicholas Ionides said in an email to Reuters.

Purvinas’s ALAEA has been campaigning against Qantas’s decision in August to outsource some work, including maintenance jobs, to other plants in Asia.

A series of rolling strikes and refused overtime by Qantas employees last fall exploded on Oct. 29 when the airline stranded thousands of passengers by grounding its fleet in response. A court order a day later got the airline flying again.

ALAEA’s “Keep Qantas Australian” campaign uses Qantas’s safety record, the best in the industry, as a rallying point.