Murdo Morrison: March 2010 Archives

I had planned to visit Evektor, one of the Czech Republic's new generation of aircraft builders, for our special feature on European general aviation which runs in our 6 April issue. But a four-hour delay on an EasyJet flight made an already ridiculously tight one-day schedule impossible (Gatwick to Prague and then rental car to Kunovice in Moravia, near the Austrian and Slovakian border), so sadly I ended up having to do the interview by email. It's never the easiest way to find out about what makes a business tick: detailed answers in perfect English to the right questions will make sure you get your facts right, but you lose a lot of the colour and sense of perspective that you get by walking around a factory and chatting in person to a chief executive or senior engineer.

One GA aircraft builder that I did manage to visit a few weeks ago was LH Aviation. This really is a start-up in every sense. Although the business has been going since 2004, its newly-renovated factory on an airfield just outside Paris is just coming to life with three "hand-built" all-composite prototypes of its Ellipse light aircraft in various stages of production (the first is already in flight test and flew for the first time at last year's Paris air show). Here I am with the very aircraft.

You can read about both companies and their highly innovative products, together with Kate Sarsfield's outlook for general aviation users in Europe and Rob Coppinger's take on electric aircraft in next week's issue.

In the latest 23-29 March issue of Flight International, Craig Hoyle has been tracking the Taliban, or at least talking to the RAF about how it uses its surveillance assets, from Tornados to Sentinel R1s to Reaper UAVs, to do it. If you've missed the magazine, you can read his feature here.

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Fancy working in the Middle East? On 11 May, Flight International will publish our third annual Middle East Careers Guide, with everything you need to know about who is recruiting, what sort of jobs are available and what it's like living and working in the region. I'm going out to research the supplement in a few weeks' time and, although I travel to the region several times a year, it will be interesting to assess the mood of recruiters.

Two years ago, when we first published the guide, airlines, MROs and business aviation operators simply could not find suitable candidates fast enough and were ramping up the inducements on offer and overtly poaching from eachother to recruit the best people. The only downside was the spiralling cost of living and shortage of accommodation that faced expats moving into the region and its then boomtown Dubai.

Since then, of course, we've had the worldwide recession and Dubai's own very painful and humiliating economic crash. However, even when I talked to recruiters in the first quarter of last year, the mood from most was still upbeat. Outside Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar were busy reinvesting their wealth from natural resources into creating aviation and aerospace infrastructures.

Even in chastened Dubai, Emirates and Dubai's international airport appeared only to slow in terms of growth, rather than go into reverse, such was their previous momentum. The emirate has such a can-do and upbeat spirit too that entrepreneurs and company bosses were insistent that Dubai's rulers had it all under control and that an upturn was just around the corner, even as abandoned, unpaid-for Porsches piled up at the airport car park, the cranes fell idle and for rent signs proliferated like weeds on a wet day.

I was last in Dubai in November and, while the roads are quieter (as opposed to the gridlock of two years ago) and hotels slightly more affordable, the place still has a buzz about it that will be difficult to suppress.

Call it denial, call it relentless optimism, but I bet when I go out there in April a bit of that boomtown ambition will be back.

There are just a matter of days left to let us know who you think should be the Flightglobal Aviator, Innovator, Leader and Lifetime Achiever of the Year and follow in the footsteps of last year's winners Hudson hero Chesley Sullenberger, Sir Richard Branson and Bob Mitchell, the "father" of the Global Hawk UAV. Based on this year's nominations, we'll be drawing up a shortlist in the four categories for flightglobal.com users to vote on from the end of April. Winners - plus the Boeing Engineering Student of the Year (chosen by a separate panel of expert former senior engineers) - will be announced at an event during the Farnborough air show on 20 July.

Cutaways are one of the USPs of Flight International and my colleagues Joe Picarella and Tim Hall spend a large chunk of their lives in factories and engineering offices capturing technical data and images of new aircraft, from airliners to UAVs to helicopters to business jets...and then painstakingly creating these drawings back home over a period of several months. About six to 10 of these appear as new drawings in Flight International each year and we have a massive archive available to view and buy on flightglobal.com. Joe and Tim are virtually the only two artists in the world who earn their living solely from drawing these remarkable pieces of art. Keep an eye out for the next one, the Boeing A160 Hummingbird unmanned helicopter in our 13 July Farnborough special.

It's been a busy time for me and all my colleagues...it's air show season already and it's only set to get worse as we roar towards Farnborough, the event that dominates our lives not just for one week in July but for several months before. That's my excuse anyway for being very negligent in keeping this blog up to date.

My colleague Kate Sarsfield will be covering Europe's big general aviation show Aero Friedrichshafen in two weeks' time. Then it's the turn of business aviation with EBACE in early May and Germany's own multi-sector air show ILA in Berlin a month later. There's not even a break after Farnborough. The following week sees the massive fly-in at Oshkosh in the USA, another big focus for the GA industry.

Not only will we be covering these shows in the magazine and on flightglobal.com, but the team will be producing show dailys at EBACE, ILA and Farnborough too. In addition, at EBACE and Farnborough, we'll be launching for the first time at these shows our new interactive daily concept, piloted at the recent Singapore air show.

Don't let anyone tell you working on Flight isn't fun. There are few better buzzes than covering an international air show as a journalist. But it's certainly not a holiday.

Here in Paris for the EADS annual results. Chief executive Louis Gallois has kicked off by listing many of EADS's achievements in the 10 years since it was created in July 2000. It is hard to argue that the Franco-German combine hasn't had some remarkable successes, with Airbus displacing Boeing as the world's number one airliner manufacturer in the early 1990s and Eurocopter consolidating its position as the number one in its sector.

The big issue dominating this year's results - and overshadowing a reasonably positive performance from EADS - has been the troubled A400M programme. Although revenues stood still in 2009 at 42.8 billion euros, the company sunk into an EBIT loss of 322 million euros, mostly due to the provision it has had to make for the A400M.

The agreement with the customer nations is better news for EADS than many had been expecting and is the result of some very clever negotiating - some might say brinksmanship - by Gallois and Airbus chief executive Tom Enders. Ultimately, the seven governments could not afford to take the political risk of destroying the programme, with all the impact on high-skill jobs and Europe's defence technology base that would have entailed.

EADS will now be hoping that the bad old days of the programme are behind it and, with flight testing now progressing, the A400M can get back on track, deliver a badly-needed and extremely versatile airlifter to its customers and perhaps even secure some export orders, revenue from which will have to be shared with the seven nations as part of the funding deal agreed last week.  

Engine technology is absolutely key to determining when and with what Airbus and Boeing replace their current top-selling narrowbody families.

When I started on Flight International in 2001, the big two were making noises about having all-new single-aisle jetliners on the market in the early years of this decade. Nine years on, we're arguably as far from flying in replacements for the A320 and 737 as we seemed to be then.

Of course, there have been two down cycles since then sparked by 9/11 and the global credit crunch. Programmes, from the A380 and A400M to the 787 and 747-8 have gone wrong, draining resources from both manufacturers.

But there are two main reasons that all-new narrowbodies have been delayed: the if-it-aint-broke factor (the A320 and 737 are still selling like hot cakes) and the engines factor (until the engine makers can deliver a step-change in performance, it is simply not worth Airbus or Boeing investing the billions required in designing new airframes).

In this week's issue we examine exactly where the aeroengine powerhouses are with their main contenders, the CFM Leap X and the geared turbofan from Pratt & Whitney, partner in CFM rival International Aero Engines. Are these the breakthroughs necessary to prompt either Airbus or Boeing to make the plunge, or does the technology still have some maturing to do?

Also in this issue, we report from the India Aviation show in Hyderabad, where the country's National Aerospace Laboratories revealed the configuration of its planned RTA-70 indigenous regional turboprop, and invited prospective international partners to take a look.

There's a story about the parts shortage plaguing the Joint Strike Fighter, something likely to prompt another delay to the troubled programme.

And Craig Hoyle reveals how the future of the Eurotraining project - which was aimed at procuring a joint aircraft and training system for military pilots in nine nations - is threatened. Have national politics and budgetary squabbling smothered an aspiration which, on paper at least, appeared to make sense? 

Confirmation just out that customer governments are going to step in to save the Airbus Military A400M programme is hardly shock news, even though the two sides have been engaging in much brinksmanship over the past few months. As Flight International noted in our Comment piece a few weeks ago, the project is simply too big to fail.

I'll be travelling to Paris on Tuesday for the EADS full-year results for 2009. Expect this agreement and its fall out to be a huge talking point.

Here is the press release just issued:

Leiden, 5 March 2010 - The Customer Nations and EADS have come to a principle agreement regarding the A400M military transport aircraft with the intention to amend the original contract accordingly in the coming weeks. In this principle agreement, the Customer Nations agree to

• Increase the price of the contract by €2 billion;
• Waive all liquidated damages related to current delays;
• Provide an additional amount of €1.5 billion in exchange for a participation in future export sales (Export Levy Facilities);
• Accelerate pre-delivery payments in the period of 2010 to 2014, a new schedule of which will be finalised in the amended contract;

 Based on this agreement, an estimate at completion of updated revenues and costs including an assessment of risks, reviewed by the EADS Board of Directors, leads to an increase of the A400M loss provision of € 1.8 billion pre tax for the full year 2009. The update of the provision is based on a management assessment taking into consideration the principle agreement between EADS and the seven Nations.

Just heard that the FIDAE air show, scheduled from 23-28 March, is going to continue, despite the earthquake and tsunami that devastated areas of the country not far from the show site near the capital Santiago.

Here's the message on the show site, which had been down for several days following the quake.

After the earthquake that struck the south-central region of Chile, this early February 27th, FIDAE informs that the fair has resumed its normal activities and that the installations are in order and working properly. Also, the organizers said that the web site of the fair is functioning and working well.
Furthermore, the organizers of the fair want to thank all the support and solidarity messages expressed by the exhibitors and the general public.
http://www.fidae.cl/portal_fidae.aspx

We had been due to run a scene-setter for the show in our 16 March issue, written by my Washington DC-based colleague Brendan Sobie, looking at the aerospace sector in Chile and neighbouring Argentina, but, following the earthquake, had more or less decided to ditch the package. Now it looks like we may have to reinstate it, together with Brendan's trip to cover the show itself.

FIDAE is not the first aviation show in recent times to be threatened by a natural disaster. Back in 2005, NBAA pulled its annual convention from New Orleans at very short notice following Hurricane Katrina, although initially it said it wanted to continue with the event. Here's the report at the time http://www.nbaa.org/news/pr/2005/20050830-048.php 

NBAA decided the city and its accommodation and convention facilities were too badly damaged, and moved the annual event to Orlando. New Orleans has never hosted the convention since, and the impact of losing the millions of dollars its attendees would have spent in the city during the week of the show definitely slowed the Big Easy's recovery.

Air shows and other conventions represent a huge injection of cash into a city and a country's economy. Apart from the prestige it brings and the shop window it creates for national exporters and suppliers, it is why the number of air shows never seems to get smaller, despite increasing squeezes on exhibitors' marketing budgets and delegates' ability to attend.

For spirit in the face of adversity, Chile and the organisers of FIDAE have to take a lot of credit. Given the pummelling the country's infrastructure has taken - even in Santiago itself, some distance from the epicentre - and the pressures on the country's military and emergency services, I am not quite sure how they are managing to continue. But good luck to them. I hope the show goes well.

We kicked off our new-look Flightglobal Achievement Awards in the run-up to last year's Dubai air show. After many years of running the old-style Aerospace Industry Awards under the Flight International banner, it was a big leap of faith, which depended on the wholescale engagement of our flightglobal.com user community and the support of commercial sponsors. The second awards, which culminate in a ceremony at the Farnborough air show, have just been launched.

The former Aerospace Industry Awards - launched in the 1990s and held at the Paris and Singapore air shows every other year - were a lavish affair: a sit-down dinner with entertainment and, unsurprisingly, a big budget that had to be met with considerable sponsorship.

However, by the late 2000s it was becoming clear that the industry was falling out of love with the concept, and we simply were not getting the level of entries and engagement necessary to sustain such a high-cost awards scheme, where winners were chosen by a jury of independent, hand-picked industry specialists.

Fortunately, the waning of enthusiasm for the Industry Awards coincided with the relaunch and the rapid growth of our flightglobal.com website at the turn of the decade. It made perfect sense for us to involve this new group of users to reinvent the awards.

The 100th birthday of Flight International gave us the perfect opportunity. As a one-off at the in 2008 we launched our 100 Greatest poll on flightglobal.com. It received over 15,000 votes and the winners in the five categories of Person, Moment, Civil Aircraft, Military Aircraft and Engine were revealed at a ceremony at that year's Farnborough show. It was a breakthrough moment for the power of engaging the readers and users of the web site in awards schemes.

The first Achievement Awards followed in 2009 and we stuck to the template, although this time we picked a shortlist from all the nominations and flightglobal.com users then chose their favourites from that list. The winners were Hudson hero Captain Chesley Sullenberger (Aviator), Northrop Grumman's Bob Mitchell, the "father" of the Global Hawk UAV (Leader) and Sir Richard Branson for his Virgin Galactic venture (Innovator).

Our Engineering Student of the Year award - organised in conjunction with Boeing - was also held alongside the new-look awards.

We've now kicked off the 2010 awards, which will culminate once again at a ceremony at Farnborough in July. This is your chance to nominate your top aviator, leader and innovator of the year, together with a new Lifetime Achievement award. Flightglobal Achievement Awards . But do it quickly. The deadline for nominations is 16 March.