Andrzej Jeziorski/MUNICHJulian Moxon/PARIS
DAIMLER-BENZ Aerospace (DASA) president Manfred Bischoff says that it is a key strategic goal for the company to bring final assembly of the Airbus A320 to its Hamburg plant, effectively making Germany the centre of excellence for narrow-body airliners within a consolidated European industry.
DASA is expected to have to indulge in some horse trading with its French Airbus partner Aerospatiale to push the strategy through, say sources in Germany. Work-share on the planned A3XX large airliner and the military Future Large Aircraft have both been identified as possible bargaining chips.
Bischoff's remarks are the latest in a line of strategy statements from the Airbus partner companies as they prepare to go into negotiations over the restructuring of the consortium into a full corporate entity. An agreement is expected to be in place by the end of the year, leading to a change in Airbus structure by 1999.
The Airbus talks, together with the current industry restructuring in France, are being seen as the first step in a much wider re-ordering of Europe's civil- and military-aerospace industry, in which all the major players are now jockeying for position.
Bischoff believes that France is due to emerge with the lead on large-civil-aircraft assembly, while military production gravitates to the UK. "This means that we will do the final assembly of all smaller Airbus types, the narrow-bodies, in Hamburg," he argues, in a recent interview with German business newspaper Handelsblatt. The Hamburg plant already assembles the A321 and A319.
By the end of this year, production at Hamburg will have increased to five aircraft a month, says DASA Airbus, with the potential to increase this to seven. If A320 production were moved from Toulouse, Hamburg could produce a maximum of ten aircraft a month, after building an additional production line, in existing hall space. To date, the maximum number of A320s ever produced at Toulouse in one month is 12.
For the Hamburg plant to be expanded, internal furnishing work on A300s and A310s would have to be moved to France.
The official line from Airbus Industrie is that there are "no formal talks" among the four partners on the centralising of narrow-body production in Germany, or changing the production work-share. "Any such arrangement would have to be agreed unanimously by all four partners and, at present, it is not on the agenda," says the European consortium.
Source: Flight International
