This was supposed to be a pivotal year for Airbus. The aircraft manufacturer had planned to ramp up production of the A350 and the new A320neo, delivering the next-generation airliners to eager customers. But the carefully scripted ramp-ups have been blown off course by suppliers, whose late deliveries have left nearly complete airplanes missing everything from engines to bathroom doors. Airbus plans to deliver 50 A350s this year. With seven months to go, it has delivered just nine. Now Airbus is going public with its ire.
At a media briefing in Hamburg, Chief Operating Officer Tom Williams singled out Pratt & Whitney, noting sarcastically that as a result of delays with Pratt’s PW-1100G engines Airbus is building A320neo “gliders.” While Airbus hopes that problem will be resolved soon, the airframer continues to be bedeviled by late deliveries of interior equipment, and CEO Fabrice Bregier says he has had enough.
“I will progressively get rid of delinquent suppliers who are not meeting the standards of our customers,” Bregier says. Airbus suppliers, he complains, are “great at marketing” but “understaffed” when it comes to engineering and execution.
“I was upset [by the issues],” he said. “I was here when we started the A350 program in 2007. We went through tons of difficulties and now we are blocked by poor quality items such as toilet doors that don’t properly shut or a few missing seats.”
Airbus head of programs Didier Evrard conceded in Hamburg this week that the A350 program was “in a big crisis” at the beginning of the year because of serious delays in the supply chain, but he believes that “delivery targets for the year remain absolutely achievable.”
Airbus wants to deliver about 650 aircraft this year. It delivered 177 by the end of April, including 144 A320-family aircraft, 19 A330s, six A350s and eight A380s.
“2016 is the beginning of a very challenging period for us,” Evrard said, referencing the A350 situation as well as the planned production hike on the A320 side. The manufacturer is defining a change program dubbed “ready to operate,” which is targeting improved aircraft readiness at the time of delivery. “We have to put in place the foundations of this program now,” Evrard said. This effort is to be rolled out over the coming years and applied to all commercial programs.
Among the initiatives is the creation of an empowered focal point within Airbus for all customer questions arising in the final phase of production and preparation for delivery.
Planning and analysis of potential hiccups as well as supply chain monitoring are other areas that need urgent improvement. “The cabin supplier issues are particularly difficult because they hit us at the very end,” Evrard says.
Many of the problems that Airbus had to deal with lately were not directly of its own making, but linked to the delayed delivery of Zodiac seats and other cabin components. Zodiac has put in place a recovery program that has raised confidence inside Airbus that the airframer will still be able to reach its target of at least 50 A350 deliveries this year. But industry sources have concerns that other suppliers have been able to hide their own delays behind the much bigger problems at Zodiac, which have been so much in the public focus. As Zodiac gets back on track, others could be facing similar issues, albeit not quite of the same magnitude.
Evrard, too, concedes that other suppliers are having a hard time facing up to their commitments. “We had to announce a couple of weeks of delays to some of our customers,” Evrard says. Among others, Cathay Pacific was affected by these issues, but finally received its first A350 last Saturday. Evrard said the “cabin supplier deficiency was not anticipated” and meant “additional stress.”
Airbus has delivered nine A350s so far this year, compared to three at the same time last year, but most of this year’s work is now left for the remaining seven months of 2016. “We know already that December will be a horrible month,” Bregier says.
Nonetheless, Evrard believes Airbus has a “strong summer plan in place that will enable us to achieve a much higher throughput in the second half of the year.” Among other measures, Airbus has added another Station 20, which is used for cabin outfitting; it has become available as A330 production ramps down.
Airbus has so far delivered 24 A350s since December 2014. In addition to the first Cathay Pacific aircraft, Qatar Airways has received eight units, Vietnam Airlines four, Finnair five and LATAM and Singapore Airlines three each. In addition, 40 A350s are currently in the final assembly process, including all three A350-1000 test aircraft. The stretched version of the aircraft is planned to be delivered to the first operator in the second half of 2017. Its first flight is to take place in September.
The in-service A350-900 fleet has been operating at a dispatch reliability of 97.8% over the past three months. According to Evrard, there are “a number of small issues, nothing big.” In his view, reliability is “at a reasonable level, but still far from where we want to be in 2-3 years.”
To address in-service performance issues, Airbus has set up an A350 Ops Center that targets quick mitigation measures, particularly when aircraft are grounded for technical reasons. Among others, the center is designed to deploy spares faster. Airbus also wants to use operational data more intelligently in the future to identify possible maintenance issues before they arise.
Supplier problems are also behind the de facto stop in deliveries of the A320neo. “We have been building gliders for the first part of the year,” Williams says. But he points out that new standard Pratt & Whitney PW1100G engines are about to arrive at the Airbus final assembly lines in Hamburg and Toulouse, so deliveries will resume. “The aircraft are parked finished, painted and ready to go,” Williams says. “All they need is engines.”
Pratt has developed software upgrades and a hardware fix that reduces the cooling time during engine startup. The manufacturer wants to limit the delay to 90 sec. per engine in the short term and to 30 sec. by the end of the year. For now, only Lufthansa and IndiGo have taken delivery of a total of six aircraft. Qatar Airways refused to accept the aircraft until the fix is complete.
In one piece of good news for the company, on May 31 Airbus received joint type certification of the CFM Leap-1A-powered version of the A320neo. That variant is to be delivered in July or August, to an as-yet undisclosed customer.
Aviation Week Network
