As US president Donald Trump continues to wield the blunt weapon of tariffs, with reactions ranging from belligerence to bafflement, the civil aerospace sector – like other industries – faces uncertainties over the potential impact, duration and even basic legality of the taxes.
If history isn’t quite repeating itself, it’s not far off. Trump was in the White House when the two behemoths of civil aircraft manufacturing, Boeing and Airbus, became enmeshed in a US-European tariff war over alleged subsidies to aircraft programmes – a dispute which had been smouldering in the World Trade Organization for years before Trump’s administration began slapping tariffs on Airbus jets, to which the European Union responded in kind. Not until Trump was voted out of office was a deal negotiated with the Biden administration.
Tariffs add another headache to a list with which the aerospace sector is having to deal. Supply-chain pressures remain a talking-point at industry events including the AIX interiors gathering in Hamburg, the Aero Friedrichshafen show in Germany and MRO Americas in Atlanta.
Trump was inaugurated to his first term on 20 January 2017 – the first anniversary of the first A320neo delivery, at which point fewer than 70 were in operation.
Just nine years since the re-engined aircraft entered service, some are already earmarked for disassembly. That’s no joke, even though Arizona-based Unical Aviation chose 1 April to reveal its plan to pick up a fleet of the type to tear down. The material contained in the aircraft is in “high demand”, it says, and it sees the supply-chain squeeze as an opportunity to push components onto the market early.
The critical importance of maintenance – on both modern aircraft and vintage – has been highlighted by safety probes into an Alaskan Douglas C-54 in-flight explosion, as well as an incident which resulted in an ATR 72 shedding a nose-wheel on take-off.
Investigations into last November’s Boeing 737-400 freighter crash at Vilnius, as well as a low-speed Embraer 190 departure from Honiara, meanwhile, underline the potentially serious consequences which can result from simple unintentional oversight in the cockpit.
