Ordinary Gweilo

I came across a rather unfortunate juxtaposition of advert and news story in last week’s Economist. They had an article about the problems with the new Airbus A380 opposite an advert from ‘Invest in France’. The advert asks the CEO of Fedex for a "French success story", and he offers this:

The new Airbus 380 is the latest wonder of flight.  The engines, wings and fuselage come from Germany, the UK, Belgium and Spain – all brought together for final assembly in Toulouse.  French manufacturers have provided numerous components, as well as the engineering know-how to bring this projection to completion.

Er, yes… The Economist’s story on the facing page (The airliner that fell to earth) had a different perspective on this "success story":

The immediate cause of the disaster was a breakdown in the snap-together final assembly process in Toulouse that has served the company well for over 30 years. Rear fuselages made in Hamburg were supposed to arrive in Toulouse with all their wiring ready to plug into the forward parts coming in from factories in north and west France. But the 500km of wiring in the two halves did not match up, causing huge problems. Failure to use the latest three-dimensional modelling software meant nobody anticipated the effect of using lightweight aluminium wiring rather than copper, which is to make bends in the wiring looms bulkier. Worse, the engineers scrambling to fix the problem did so in different ways. So the early aircraft all have their own one-of-a-kind wiring systems. It will take all of next year to introduce a proper standardised process.

None of this would have mattered so much if the airliner’s fuselage had all been built in France. But Germany lobbied hard to land a big chunk of the A380, to add to the final assembly of some derivatives of the A320 family. Now the greater complexity of the super-jumbo has shown up the inherent weaknesses in Airbus’s production system, just as it faces a revitalised Boeing and a weaker dollar. Most of Airbus’s costs are in euros, but sales are in dollars. So Airbus’s new boss, Christian Streiff, must slash costs.

Brilliant.