Airbus wing factory, Broughton, North Wales
Challenging times Alongside the ongoing Brexit negotiations and a trend towards consolidation, there are plenty of other issues impacting on the European aerospace sector. Murdo Morrison, editor of Flight International Magazine, looks at the continued rivalry between Airbus and Boeing, as well as how the smaller players are faring in today’s uncertain climate.
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or an illustration of how tightly Airbus’s UK operations are bound with its final assembly lines in Hamburg and Toulouse, visit the European aircraft maker’s wing factory in Broughton. As Airbus prepares to ramp up production of its A320 narrowbody family to roughly 60 a month by 2019 – mainly to meet unprecedented demand for air travel in Asia and other emerging regions – some four wings a day will need to be shipped from North Wales. And that is not counting around a further one each day of the larger and even more complex structures for Airbus’s widebody range. Not since World War Two has Europe’s aerospace industry depended on such just-in-time output. Whatever the outcome of the Brexit negotiations, they are unlikely to pitch an immediate spanner in the works of this intricate relationship. But many UK aerospace leaders – and their continental counterparts – fret that a hard departure from the EU 6 Industry Europe
that leaves the country outside the customs union and single market could cause massive disruption to Airbus and its UK supply chain. As with other industries, the prospect of trucks and Beluga transport aircraft being held up at Channel ports or Toulouse and Hamburg airports as endless documentation is checked and approved leaves many profoundly worried about UK industry’s longterm ability to remain in the Airbus machine. But should it? While the time taken to transport goods from supplier to customer is as valuable as in any other sector, aerospace manufacturers have been operating with diverse global supply networks since the beginning of the century. A factory in southern Italy makes large sections of Boeing 787 Dreamliners that are assembled in plants on the east and west coasts of the USA, while European firms, not least engine-makers RollsRoyce and Safran, are key Boeing suppliers. Similarly, US, Canadian, Korean and Chinese companies design and build components for
Airbus. Commercial aviation may connect the world, but the supply chains that produce the aircraft also span the planet. Therefore, those more sanguine about Brexit believe that the ingenuity of logistics will find a way around any complications caused by a 2018 UK departure from the European Union. Changing suppliers in aerospace is not easy. Programme partners, as they are often called, share investment risk and intellectual property. The complexity of creating a competitive aerospace industry – even at second-tier supplier level – can take decades of training and investment. This is partly why only one commercial airliner manufacturer – Brazil’s Embraer – has emerged in the past 25 years, and why even high-tech economies such as Japan and China have struggled to join the club.
Deeper issues Brexit aside, Europe’s dominant aerospace manufacturer has a few other concerns. While the challenge of rallying a supply chain to
