Reflecting true collaboration

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Magazine Article, Source : The Manufacturer
Zone : Innovation Design and PLM
Published : October 2004

The essence of design and production collaboration is epitomised by the Airbus A380 programme. John Dwyer discovers how this pan- European product was developed

O n July 30, engineers in Airbus’s Jean-Luc Lagardère final assembly hall in Toulouse powered up the A380 double-decker jumbo’s electrical systems for the first time. At 490m long, 250m wide and 46m high, the £240 million hall, next to Blagnac airport, is one of the largest covered spaces in Europe. And its occupants know that, when the world’s only twin-deck, four-aisle airliner goes into service in 2006, the 555-seat monster will have a lot more riding on it than passengers. Airbus is already thrashing its Seattle rival in a toe-to-toe contest for the 100-plus-seat market. Airbus has outsold Boeing since 1999 and actually delivered 300 planes against Boeing’s 285 in 2003. Boeing is losing money. Airbus is cash rich with profits at seven per cent of sales.

But to take Boeing’s crown decisively Airbus must end a long-haul reign that dates back 35 years to the first commercial flight for the (then) 400 seat 747. Since entering service the 747 has carried 3.6 billion people more than 35 billion nautical miles (74,000 journeys to the moon and back). Hence the $11 billion investment in A380. Airbus must sell 230 of them to break even. Thai Airways’ August 27 order for six takes the tally to 139. The biggest customer, for 41, is Emirates, dwarfing second biggest Lufhansa’s 15. Notable absentees so far are Cathay Pacific, the Japanese, and Boeing groupie British Airways.

Airbus is truly European. Its planes are made by one company that happens to have 16 manufacturing sites across Europe. Until 1970 European countries had their own aerospace industries. They made aircraft their home airlines wanted and the rest of the world didn’t. Boeing, Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas made planes that sold worldwide. BAC’s best selling Trident notched up 117 sales. Boeing’s equivalent 727 sold 1861.

A few visionaries saw the way the wind was blowing. Senior Airbus spokesman David Velupillai in Toulouse knew some of them. Before his 20 years with Airbus, he was an engineer at Hawker Siddeley in Hatfield, then a reporter for Flight International. Velupillai says that, in bringing Airbus together: “We had to convince these companies to give up overall design capability for making a complete aircraft and accept instead to be part of a bigger whole.”

The French, German and later, Spanish and UK founders established Airbus in 1970 as a successor to Concorde and the lesser known Franco-German Transport Allianz (Transall) C160, a twin-engined turbo-prop transport aircraft for the French and German air forces.

But though A380 uses some Concorde technology – it pumps fuel between tanks to balance its centre of gravity through the flight – Concorde’s chief lesson, says Velupillai, was “how not to structure an industrial European partnership.”

On Concorde, “You’d have a British person leading a team one year and then a French person the next year. That’s no way to build continuity. There were a lot of things that we learned how not to do from the Concorde experience.”

Velupillai worked with Airbus’s first managing director, Roger Beteille, “a modest, quiet, self- effacing sort of person who had a working style of getting people to cooperate by persuasion. He was exactly the right sort of manager, the right sort of style of character for the job of bringing people together.”

In 2001 European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), a merger between Aerospatiale, Daimler Chrysler Aerospace and Construcciones Aeronauticas of Spain, and BAe Systems transferred all of their Airbus assets to one company. EADS took an 80 per cent sharehold and BAe the rest.

Velupillai says the language difficulty for Airbus’s 50,000 employees is overstated. Plane makers, he says, speak engineering, not French or German. The working language is English because that is the language of aviation and, like it or not, the world’s second language.

The work stays where the skills are: final assembly in Toulouse and Hamburg; wings in Broughton, UK; cockpits in St Nazaire, France; cabin systems and lighting in Buxtehude, Germany and so on. But transnational groups of engineers have formed at all the sites.

And Airbus has 1500 suppliers worldwide. Several hundred in north America provide everything from nuts and bolts to navigational systems, landing gear and engines. Though 40 A380 orders specify Rolls-Royce’s new Trent engine, the General Electric and Pratt&Witney (P&W) joint venture Engine Alliance (EA) will power the Emirates’ aircraft, and a UK owned supplier – Cobham’s Aurora, Colorado, based offshoot Stanley Aviation – makes EA’s engine handling systems.

The A380, says Velupillai, offers 15 to 20 per cent lower direct operating cost per seat than the 747. Half of the improvement comes from economy of scale, the rest from technology: better aerodynamic design; lighter materials, fly by wire and ease of maintenance through diagnostics.

Nearly half the A380’s parts – more than any civil plane in history – will be composites: carbon fibre, some polymer plastics and glass reinforced aluminium (Glare). Glare is stronger and up to 25 per cent lighter than aluminium, and has higher resistance to corrosion, metal fatigue and fire. Each A380 takes 27 Glare panels up to 11 feet long with a total area of 470 square metres.

ShinMaywa Industries of Kobe, Japan, has been delivering composite ramp surfaces of the A380 wing since February this year and, in April shipped a carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) main wing root fillet fairing.

Airbus links its factories and suppliers over a system called Airbus Concurrent Engineering (ACE). ACE, developed under a Ä38 million, three year EC funded concurrent engineering research project, is the master database for all manufacturing process information, from master geometry through space allocation to manufacturing process definitions, computer aided manufacturing (CNC) data and test procedures and results.

ACE, according to ACE project manager Dipl Ing Wilfried Rieckmann, has transformed the conventional ways of working using legacy tools within development and manufacturing into “an innovative, harmonised, 3D CAD and PDM tool-based development process.”

The plane could not have been built, says Rieckmann, without the combination of concurrent engineering and 3D CAD tools like Catia. “And without using a master model approach in conjunction with a modern internet-based PDM tool [Parametric Technology’s Windchill], Airbus would be unable to manage its wide range of partners, suppliers and subcontractors.”

The first A380 metal, cut in January 2002, continued Airbus’s policy of integral machining. Airbus wing spars are either a single piece from root to tip, or two or three pieces each machined from a block: “You start out with a block of metal and machine away 90 per cent of the metal to leave the finished part in the wing skins of the aircraft, in the ribs, or in some of the heavier frames in the fuselage.”

Airbus plans four A380s a month by 2008. Airbus has pared final assembly to the bone. It now represents “less than four per cent of the work that goes into each aircraft,” says Velupillai. Every section that arrives at Toulouse or Hamburg for final assembly is already fitted out with electrical cables, hydraulic pipes, insulation blankets and air conditioning ducts.

Keeping 96 per cent of the work at the 16 factory sites persuaded the member companies to come together in the first place. And it’s more efficient. Final assembly benefits by keeping people trying to install equipment away from people who are joining things together, says Velupillai.

After assembly at one workstation on the Jean-Luc Lagardère line, the plane is equipped and tested at further stations in the same building. The power-up of the prototype A380, MSN 001, took place in one of these. Other stations will test hydraulically operated systems such as the flying controls (rudder, elevator, ailerons), slats and flaps, and landing gear extension and retraction. Tests for cabin pressurisation, fuelling trials and engine runs will take place outside the line.

The A380 will have a wingspan of 80m, over 15m wider than a 747-400, and a length of 73m, or 2.4m longer than the 747. It will stand almost 25m high. Until A380, Airbus’s fleet of five outsized Beluga cargo aircraft ferried parts from Germany, the UK, France or Spain to Toulouse within hours.

The A380 fuselage sections and tail-fins are so large they must travel by sea from Hamburg, Mostyn, UK, St Nazaire, France, and Cadiz, Spain, to a specially built terminal at Pauillac, near Bordeaux. Barges take them 100km up river, where they move to purpose-built 96-axle road trailers, each over 50 metres long, to travel the last 230km along a specially – and controversially – widened road to Toulouse. The graceful plane trees, ironically, are gone.

Fully loaded, the A380 could weigh 620 tons – 40 per cent more than a 747. Airbus talks of larger seats and facilities such as casinos, bars, gyms, and even a library. More probable is that its customers will kick all that out in favour of more seating. Up to 800 will fly at a time. A380’s future may well hang on how much passengers enjoy either that experience or the eventual wait for their luggage. Bon Voyage.

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