Airbus A300/A310 freighter conversion specialist EADS-EFW is expanding its facilities in Dresden to enable it to double modification output to over 20 a year.
“We have firm bookings until 2009,” said EADS-EFW director sales Wolfgang Schmid at the Cargo Facts 2005 conference in Seattle. “We’ve been able to carry out eight conversions a year, but have reorganised the line to increase this to 14.”
Schmid said that the previous modification line configuration required four and half months downtime for each conversion, but this has been reduced to four months by “reorganising the logistics”. A further boost will be achieved next year when a hangar extension is completed, which will push the rate to 21 a year by mid-2006.
EADS-EFW vice-president sales and customer support Jürgen Habermann says that while the rate could be increased further by reintroducing a second line at EADS-Sogerma Services in Bordeaux, the bottleneck is the production rate of the conversion kits in Dresden.
“We use the same jig to produce the kits for the conversions and the new build A300-600Fs, and this has a maximum rate of around 30 a year,” he says. “With 21 conversions a year and production of new builds running at 10 annually, we would have to add another set of jigs to go any higher.”
MAX KINGSLEY-JONES/SEATTLE
Source: Flight International
