High Stakes for Airbus in Getting New Jet to Market

Less than two weeks after its parent abandoned a megamerger with BAE Systems, Airbus is set to enter a critical new phase in the development of its newest airplane, the A350, which will come under greater scrutiny as the industry faces a cyclical downturn in new orders and a still-tentative recovery in air travel. 

On Tuesday in Toulouse, France, Airbus plans to hold a formal inauguration of the final assembly line for the A350, a twin-engine wide-body jet that is scheduled to enter commercial service in late 2014. The aircraft will be the first by Airbus to have more than half of its structural components made from lightweight, plastic-based composite materials, rather than aluminum. 

The A350 will also be the company’s first all-new product since the A380 superjumbo, which has been wildly popular with fliers since entering service in 2007 but became a symbol of cross-cultural and industrial dysfunction that Airbus is eager to put behind it. 

“Airbus learned a great deal from the A380 as far as the need for standardizing, better coordinating and integrating their internal design processes,” said Hans Weber, chief executive of Tecop International, an aviation consulting business based in San Diego. “It wasn’t easy.” 

Six years ago, miscommunications in the design, manufacturing and installation of several hundred kilometers of electrical cables resulted in a devastating three-year delay to the A380 program that ultimately led to a reshuffling in management, the elimination of 10,000 jobs and more than $6 billion in losses. 

Fabrice Brégier, who took over in June as the Airbus chief executive, has been deeply involved in the plane maker’s restructuring since he joined as chief operating officer in 2006 and is determined not to repeat the exercise. 

In addition to centralizing its internal design systems and decision-making processes, Airbus has involved the key suppliers to the A350 in the design process from the start, sharing digital blueprints with them and even dispatching its own engineers to help train and guide contractors. The result, Airbus hopes, will be to minimize delays through quicker and more transparent communication of incremental changes across the production and supply chains. 

“I think we have improved a lot in having a better management of our operations, bringing much more transparency and professionalism,” Mr. Brégier said in an interview this summer. “Big groups are always overwhelmed by bureaucracy, by complex processes. We are evolving our organization to make it simpler.” 

That is not to say that such organizational improvements have managed to keep the A350 project — now estimated at €12 billion to €13 billion, or $15.6 billion to $17 billion — on schedule. 

In the summer of 2011, Airbus delayed its anticipated delivery dates for two of the plane’s three versions by two years, to 2016 and 2017, to meet customers’ demands for a more powerful engine for the largest version, the A350-1000, and to focus its engineering resources better on building its top-selling version, the 314-seat A350-900, which it had promised to customers beginning in late 2013. Airbus has more than 350 orders for the A350-900, while its 270-seat model, the A350-800, has garnered 118 orders and the 350-seat A350-1000 has just 88. 

Then, almost a year ago, the delivery goal for the A350-900 crept back another six months, the result of a maddening shortage of parts from third-party suppliers who were scrambling to meet demand from Airbus as Boeing gradually speeded up production of its competing 787 Dreamliner, which entered service in late 2011 and is also largely built from the same lightweight composite materials. European Aeronautic Defense & Space, Airbus’s parent, booked a €200 million charge on its 2011 third-quarter earnings due to the delay 

A bug was subsequently discovered early this year in the software that drives robots responsible for drilling holes in the plane’s carbon fiber wings — which are 32 meters, or 105 feet, long — at a site in Broughton, Wales. The problem, which Airbus says it has since fixed, required that workers drill holes in the first five wings — including those for the first flight-test aircraft — by hand, adding €124 million to the A350’s development bill and pushing back the first deliveries to the second half of 2014. 

Airbus said it was sticking to that timetable, with plans to begin a 12-month flight test program next summer. But analysts said they anticipated that the calendar would slip further. It is normal, they said, for snags to arise in the production and testing of new planes, especially when they use new technologies. 

“Experience of recent programs shows you can get a long way into the development process before trouble shows up,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace consultant at Teal Group, an analysis firm in Fairfax, Virginia. In the case of the A350’s entry into service, he said, “we have always assumed mid-2015, and we are still sticking with that.” 

In addition to lessons from the painful birth of the A380, Airbus has learned much from studying Boeing’s missteps with the 787, which was three years late amid numerous problems linked to inexperience with the new composite materials, outsourcing of key elements of the plane, parts shortages and other issues. 

“The 787 was rolled out as an intact aircraft before anyone figured out that things were terribly wrong,” Mr. Aboulafia said. 

The 72,000-square meter, or 775,000-square-foot, A350 facility in Toulouse, in the southwest of France, currently houses a fully assembled version of the plane that will be used for ground tests, as well as the fuselage and vertical tail plane of the first flyable A350 — one of a fleet of five to be used in flight tests. Airbus aims eventually to produce 10 finished aircraft a month at the site by 2018. 

Even if Airbus manages to limit further production delays, analysts said EADS still faced challenges in keeping the program financed. Some estimate that the setbacks thus far have already added €2 billion to the A350’s final bill. 

“Everything that goes wrong increases the financing requirements,” said Nick Cunningham, an aerospace analyst at Agency Partners, a research firm in London. “Even when these programs are successful, they lose a lot of money and use up a lot of cash in their early years.” 

In addition to about €13 billion in nonrecurring development costs, he estimated the A350 would tie up a further €9 billion in EADS’s available working capital for several years before it started to recoup those costs as new planes were delivered and paid for. 

The project has already helped to drain EADS’s net cash position to about €9.7 billion at the end of June, from nearly €12 billion at the end of last year. Airbus has said it expects several major A350 suppliers to foot about €2 billion of the costs in exchange for a share of the program’s eventual profits. European governments could also provide as much as €4 billion in preferential loans, although at least one — Germany’s — recently threatened to withhold some of those funds unless it receives guarantees of jobs linked to the project. 

State funding for civil aircraft is a politically charged subject. In a seven-year-old dispute with the European Union before the World Trade Organization in Geneva, the United States challenged such government loans, sometimes referred to as “launch aid,” for past Airbus jets as illegal subsidies that unfairly hurt Boeing. While the W.T.O. has so far rejected the U.S. claim, Washington has not ruled out the possibility of bringing a new suit against the Union that would specifically focus on launch aid for the A350. 

Most analysts said Airbus and European governments would probably be extremely careful to structure any A350 loans so they complied with W.T.O. rules.

Source: NY Times

Related links:

• Official Airbus Website
• Airbus on Wikipedia