Roll the clock forward three years, and Airbus bosses in Toulouse are set to recommend to the EADS board their proposals for where each element of the A32X – the A320 family successor – is to be designed and built. Much of the aircraft will be made of lightweight composite materials and the company’s German and Spanish divisions – and their local subcontractors – have made great strides in composite technologies.
A key decision is where to source the largely carbonfibre wings. The airframer’s UK plants in Filton and Broughton have designed and manufactured every Airbus wing since the early 1970s, and been responsible for roughly a fifth of the value of each aircraft. But Germans and Spaniards in EADS’s boardroom – egged on by their politicians – have been lobbying hard for the wing business. There has never been a Briton on the EADS board to argue for the UK, and since BAE Systems sold its 20% stake in Airbus three years earlier, there have been steadily fewer Brits stalking the corridors of power in Toulouse. At a recent ceremony at Broughton, the UK prime minister made a passionate case for Airbus UK to remain the wing “centre of excellence”. But his counterparts in Madrid and Germany are better connected, and – despite tougher global trade rules on launch subsidies since the transatlantic spat was settled in 2007 – they have hinted that they will do all in their power to secure the business.
Is this a scenario made more likely by BAE’s abandoning of its Airbus stake – something that moved closer last week after the UK firm exercised its put option to sell to EADS? Many within the UK aerospace community think so. Whatever the country’s expertise in wing technology, why would EADS’s board – made up mainly of Frenchmen, Germans and Spaniards (two of them government placemen) – sanction major spending in an “offshore” location? Especially when rigid labour laws and stand-for-no-nonsense trade unions make it easier to add work to continental factories than take it away.
Well, there are two factors that could save it for the UK – one to do with business and one with politics.
The business case is that, in a marketplace where Airbus must save every cent and compete with Boeing for every airline order, it simply cannot afford to be parochial. In the early days, it was about a sum of the parts – harnessing the strengths of national aerospace champions to create a viable European airliner manufacturer that was supported by subsidies and shoo-in orders from state-owned carriers. Today, Airbus must simply build better, more efficient aircraft than its rival. And to do that, it must continue to source from centres of excellence that can deliver the right product.
Spain has been successful in winning workshare through its skills in composites – it is responsible for roughly 10% of the A380, double its traditional share. Germany has always harboured ambitions to show the rest of Europe what it can do on large airliner wings. But the wing business is Britain’s to lose. After under-investing in composites research and development for years, the country’s industry and government are determined to catch up. Many hope it will not be too late for advances to feed through into the design departments at Filton and the UK supply chain.
But there is a political argument too, and it is one that – despite scepticism – favours the UK. Airbus UK has been an enigma. Despite being part of an integrated Airbus organisation since 2001, the UK government has always felt it has to deal with BAE as its “national representative” in Airbus. Even though EADS has had a high-profile UK corporate office for two years, its staff were always reluctant to bang the drum for Airbus. The fact that EADS and Airbus will now effectively be one and the same tidies things up and elevates the status of EADS UK.
EADS sees the UK defence market as one of its biggest prospects. Although it “controls” the market in Germany and Spain, the spend there is small. And in France, it has to compete with a competitor it partly owns, Dassault Aviation. A company that is desperate to be seen as a domestic prime contractor – the company has a substantial industrial footprint in the defence and space sectors – is hardly likely to abandon its biggest business in that country.
Back to 2009, and those continental executives gathered round the boardroom table might just – even if rather reluctantly – be raising their hands for the UK.
Source: Flight International
