Airbus on course after miraculous comeback

Jul 11 2007 by Bill Gleeson, Liverpool Daily Post

AFTER a year in which its fortunes were blown off course by problems with its flagship jet, Airbus seems to have made something of a miraculous comeback over recent months.

The European aircraft maker is confident it has ironed out production problems with the A380 superjumbo and there are moves to streamline its convoluted management structure which in part was responsible for those difficulties. To top it all, the company came away from the Paris air show last month with new orders for hundreds of its airliners.

Airbus has won 680 firm agreements in the first six months of 2007 to pull ahead of American rival manufacturer Boeing in new contracts and expects to deliver about 450 aircraft this year.

But not everything is going smoothly for Airbus. Fears are growing that an escalating dispute with jet-engine sup-plier General Electric could delay deli-veries of its A350 extra wide body jet.

Reports from the US say GE and Airbus are at loggerheads because the largest version of the A350 XWB is to compete with the largest version of Boeing's 777 aircraft for which GE is the exclusive engine supplier.

The dispute comes days after Boeing unveiled its new lightweight, carbon composite 787 Dreamliner aircraft. The mid-sized long-range aircraft will com-pete with the yet-to-be-built A350 XWB which has GE's UK rival Rolls-Royce as the only current engine supplier.

GE officials have said they will not build a new engine that competes with the one they supply for the 777 but the company has offered Airbus a version of a new engine which it is creating for the Dreamliner. Airbus executives said that engine is suitable only for the two smaller sizes of the three proposed A350 sizes.

Both Boeing and Airbus like to give customers a choice of engine suppliers and there is concern the lack of engine choice could hurt the sales of the A350.

Airbus and GE have both said nego-tiations about the engines for the A350 are continuing but workers at Airbus’ Broughton plant, near Chester, will be watching developments closely. The site which provides work for about 7,000, including engineers and technicians from Merseyside and Cheshire, makes wings for all Airbus airliners and, for the first time, is scheduled to use carbon fibre composite in the A350 XWB wings.

The 250-seat 787 will fly for the first time this autumn and will go into passenger service next May.

To date, Boeing has won 677 orders for the 787 which has a list price of around £80m and – with a projected production rate of 100 of the jets a year – is sold out until 2015, two years after Airbus expects to roll out its competing A350 XWB. Airbus says its plane, which will reach the market five years after its American competitor, will be even more fuel efficient than the Dreamliner.

Boeing is riding high after taking orders for the new 787s from 47 custom-ers. But some Airbus officials say Boe-ing’s new jet has yet to prove itself and that the US firm may yet hit production problems as it did with its own A380 superjumbo.

“Our production people are saying Boeing is ramping up too fast and will stumble,” said John Leahy, Airbus chief operating officer.

There are already said to be signs Boeing and its suppliers are struggling to match the production schedule for the Dreamliner.

Airbus recently won new orders for the two-engine, twin-aisle A350 XWB, but still trails Boeing's Dreamliner. The big question to be answered is whether Boeing has judged the market better than its European rival.

While Airbus pinned its hopes on the 555-seat A380, cornering a significant chunk of the global aviation market over the next 20-30 years, Boeing has gone for a smaller plane.

The superjumbo is intended to fly between key airports such as Heathrow, Los Angeles, Sydney and Dubai, with passengers then changing to smaller aircraft for connecting flights. So far, orders have been placed for more than 170 superjumbos.

But Boeing believes more passengers will want to fly “point-to-point”, direct to the city they are visiting. Hence its medium-sized, long-haul Dreamliner.

After spending years on the A380 project, Airbus is keen not to cede the long haul, medium-sized jet market to Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. It is now try-ing to catch up, but its original A350 design used an existing fuselage and was rejected as not being revolutionary enough. The company was forced back to the drawing board and came up with the A350 XWB, an all-new aircraft.

david.r.jones@dailypost.co.uk