December 2005 Archives

Boeing is understandably pretty pleased with itself over selling its 6,000th  "737" earlier this week. But I think the real achievement is better stated as having sold, in round numbers, 1,000 of one family, 2,000 of the first derivative, and 3,000 of the next derivative. Those are roughly the figures for the -100/200 models, -300/400/500 models, and -600/700/800/900 line.

Now that is a truly remarkable industrial record. Both upgrades were almost complete re-engineerings of the existing product at high cost, but both pay tribute to the original 737 design which, like the 747, has proved one of the world's most enduring functional transport concepts. Boeing truly understood the crucial importance of replacing itself in the market and knew where to make fundamental changes - like the switch to the CFM56 and the digital cockpit - and where to tweak - as it did in countless elements of the aircraft.

Since then of course the A320 family has come on the scene and revolutionised the business - but it is further testament to Boeing's original design that a recognisable 737 is competing fairly successfully head-to-head with Airbus. However, the talk now is of what happens next.

CFMI's recently departed CEO Pierre Fabre set the hare running when, at the Farnborough airshow in 2004, and with typically brilliant CFMI marketing acumen, he briefed the media on the company's ideas about how to power the next generation of Airbus and Boeing narrowbodies when they entered service in about 2012. He grabbed the headlines and, as I'm sure was his intent, the intellectual agenda.

What he failed to do was smoke Airbus and Boeing out of their holes. Yes, they cautiously agreed, of course they were thinking about that, but we should not expect anything anytime soon. You can see their point of view - A320 and 737 production was forecast (and still is) to be going very nicely through 2010, and probably through 2012 so long as people keep buying them. Neither is keen to encourage the thought that the designs are on their way out.

Two different people this week described the situation with the same analogy (so they probably heard it from the same third person) - it's like that odd Olympian spectacle of speed cycling (about which I know more or less nothing.) In that sport the competitors ride gently around a track in a gaggle until one decides the moment has come to make a break and attempts to race to the line while the others try to overtake him in a furious sprint.

The key factors, I suppose, are a) who makes the best decision when or if to break b) who manages to match the break c) who can then ride fastest and most skilfully to win the sprint. It is a truly elegant analogy for the narrowbody situation. Neither Airbus nor Boeing wants to start this expensive next stage of their war, but most certainly neither can afford to be left behind, and in the end both will have to build superb aircraft.

They have an additional challenge this time around - how on earth can they differentiate their, relatively simple, designs. One possibility is a twin-aisle versus a single-aisle - but you suspect both will come to the same conclusion. Another is materials - and although the 787 will give Boeing some composite learning, there are few materials technology secrets in aerospace these days.

But if the whole thing is fought on cost then the marketeers and salesmen will be the foot-soldiers and generals alike. And the aerospace industry doesn't like commoditising its products. (Boeing's brief dalliance with that idea in the 1990s ended deeply unhappily you'll recall.)

But a 2012 entry into service - I don't think so.

(My colleague Guy Norris most recently wrote about this subject here.)

BAE Systems stock shot up yesterday, even by its own dizzying recent standards, and put on another 5% in the opening hours of trading today following confirmation of the UK-Saudi government-to-government deal that includes the purchase of 24 Eurofighter Typhoons.

On this occasion the market's reaction is fully justified - the deal is of huge importance to Britain's aerospace giant and is the product of agonising negotiations to sustain the Al Yamamah business relationship that has so far been worth a reported ｣43 billion.

It's true of course that 24 aircraft is not a huge quantity - but outside the USA it's about as many current generation fighters as anyone can hope to shift in an international sale in one go. It also helps keep BAE in the platform business for a while to come and beefs up its financial strength at a time when big-ticket partnerships are likely to be in its future.

But in the world of commercial aerospace things are not so rosy. BAE's activity in the field is essentially its 20% share in Airbus. And with the air transport sector growing like crazy - Airbus deliveries will be 370 in 2005 against 320 last year - life should be sweet indeed.

Not so unfortunately. BAE has been unable to shrug off its regional aircraft legacy and this year's Chapter 11 filings in the US, where bankruptcy judges have been particularly happy to see the aircraft lessors take the hit, have been a ghastly experience for it. Indeed it has just had to announce that the growth in its share of Airbus profits has been wiped out by the latest liabilities.

The talk for years has been around whether BAE should liquidate its Airbus holding, probably as part of its strategic thrust into the US. But I have the nasty feeling that this company may have to take one last hit to fix this chronic problem before it makes its 'big move'.

Weirdly enough British Airways (BA) is yet again on the receiving end of a public dressing down from the UK's regulatory authorities. This time the Air Accidents Investigation Branch is giving them a very hard time indeed over what it found when it dug down into BA's maintenance empire after a medium-embarrassing incident with a 757 back in 2003.

That comes just a few weeks after the AAIB also jumped on an incident when a BA A319 crew shrugged off a mid-air electronics failure with rather more sang froid than the investigators felt was appropriate. And that was distressingly close to another report which also widened its remit from looking at a panel loss on take-off to several other events that the investigators felt were looking alarmingly like a pattern.

Surprise was also expressed in the business (though not unanimously, and mostly in the USA) when a BA crew flew a loaded 747-400 from Los Angeles to the UK after suffering an engine failure shortly after take-off.

Now all this, remember, concerns an airline with a quite superb safety record and which more or less literally wrote the book on some aspects of safety management - notably the BASIS programme which was in large part the driver for the global spread of the flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) concept that is one of the single most important factors in achieving today's extremely high safety rates in the developed world.

So what's going on? Well, there is no doubt that morale in BA's engineering world has taken a thumping over the last few years and people are not happy there. On the other hand, even those who are yelping the loudest are not alleging that safety has been reduced (well, only the occasional voice, and there's always a couple in any airline.)

Here's my view - commercial aviation in the UK is a) practised by some of the finest exponents of the art in the world and b) is more tightly regulated than just about anywhere in the world. In particular, the AAIB boasts some of the wisest heads in the industry or, to put it another way, some canny old dogs who've seen just about everything.

I confess to love reading AAIB reports. The best of them are drafted with a dryness bordering on irony so that you can practically see the author's fractionally raised eyebrow as he listened to an erring pilot's explanation of his, umm, novel way of flying an ILS.

But when the subject is the multi-billion pound corporation that is BA today, the AAIB, in an ever so gentlemanly way, takes its gloves off. And if you're BA then by far the best course of action is to pay attention, say as little as possible in public, and take some very energetic action indeed in private.

I wouldn't have it any other way. And actually I doubt BA would either.

(You can read the whole report on the 757 here.)

The US Air Force's newest fighter stands poised to enter operational service this week, but with a new name. The Lockheed Martin F/A-22 is renamed the F-22A. The USAF's official explanation says the 'F/A' designation was invented three years ago as a marketing tool aimed at selling the Raptor as a multi-role fighter to a sceptical US Congress. A series of successful operational tests has since proved the point, so the USAF is now free to revert to tradition.

Perhaps the odd cynic might wonder if there was a different explanation -- perhaps a tacit admission of the F-22A's primarily single-role air-to-air abilities until a series of spiral upgrades are complete by 2009. Those would include a two-way data link and a multi-mode active radar.

For what it's worth, General Michael "Buzz" Moseley offered his own interpretation during a roundtable with reporters at the Pentagon on 13 December. Here's his reason:

"You can take this a bit to the extreme about the F/A, because [the Raptor] is equally capable as a Rivet Joint; it's equally capable as a Compass Call; it's equally capable as all these other aircraft when you look at the wide variety of things that it does. But we had no desire to call it an RC or an EW or an F/A/EW/RC-22Something. So the simplicity of this is the air force has fighters with the nomenclature of F which should be in the lineage of the rest of the fighters."

What is your opinion?

It is rare to spot something truly new in one of the hundreds of reports issued each year by US Department of Defense's legion of internal think-tanks, much less learn of the existence of an undisclosed, revolutionary helicopter development project. But it can happen.

And so it is with the recently published, 175-page report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Mobility . Under the subheading, "Future capabilities" (page 56), it casually unveils a US Marine Corps proposal to build the largest helicopter in history. It lists two candidates to replace the USMC's venerable CH-53E - the CH-53X and the CH-53X+.

The CH-53X is now called the Heavy Lift Rotorcraft (HLR), and is correctly described by the DSB as a proposal to develop a new variant of the CH-53E that can transport a 27,000lb payload about 110nm.

Then comes the news about the CH-53X+. Here's what the report says:

"The CH-53X+ is designed to carry a 40,000-pound payload to a range of 250 nautical miles. It would require making major aerodynamic and structural changes to the CH-53E. Maintaining current disc loading would require a 116- to 120-foot-diameter rotor. This modification would in turn require a redesigned fuselage and an extended tail rotor boom.

"Some members of the helicopter design community have observed that the capabilities projected for the CH-53X+ represent a major challenge. The introduction of a new engine, a much larger rotor, higher disc loading, a new tail boom, and (probably) a new transmission amounts to a new aircraft, with many design unknowns.

"Further, a helicopter with a rotor diameter of 120 feet and takeoff weight of approximately 160,000 pounds may not be compatible with existing ships. The anticipated requirement to carry more than 40,000 pounds to ranges of 250 to 300 miles is similar to the capabilities of the Russian Mi-26 HALO helicopter. The existence of the Mi-26 suggests that the technology for such an aircraft already lies beyond technology readiness level 6. However, it is not clear that the airframe of this aircraft has the dimensions to allow internal carriage of ISO containers or Stryker vehicles."

Ordinarily, this little blurb would make quite the news story. But there's a problem - neither Sikorsky nor the Naval Air Systems Command nor the US Marine Corps' requirements branch apparently has knowledge of nor interest in such a massive new helicopter. Representatives of each organisation have theorised that the DSB may have confused the CH-53X+ proposal with a possibly aged - and long-forgotten, if it ever existed - concept for a CH-53 variant for the separate Joint Heavy Lift proposal, which is a US Army-led programme.

So perhaps for now we'll call the CH-53X+ a mystery. But if anyone spots a new variant of a CH-53E that has a fuselage the size of a Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules, give us a ring.

Cobham www.cobham.com is rather proud of the fact that it has one of the smallest and most inauspicious head offices of any top aerospace manufacturer. The UK manufacturer - ranked 35th in terms of sales in the industry - eschews either a prestigious London address or a landscaped, modern office complex. Instead, the nerve-centre of its $1.8 billion operation - which controls 80 individual businesses across the world making everything from air refuelling equipment to microwave antennas to aerobatic aircraft - is tucked away behind a street of bungalows in the West Country backwater of Wimborne, next to one of its factories. Inside, the feel is one of 1970s local government office rather than modern, global aerospace player.

Cobham has expanded fast over the past few years, particularly in the USA. But the businesses it has been buying, ranging from tiny family firms employing half a dozen people to multi-million dollar enterprises, have been left largely alone by head office to go on doing what they are good at: designing clever stuff, buying from their own established suppliers and knowing their customer. As long as they all abided by the same financial reporting rules and met their sales and profits targets, the board was happy to sit back and run the big strategy.

But with customers like Boeing and Airbus increasingly streamlining their supply chains, opting to deal at a senior procurement level with a handful of sub-systems integrators, rather than hundreds of small contractors, it has become harder for loosely-integrated groups such as Cobham to sell their myriad of wares directly. There is also the danger of technology breakthroughs, that could have benefits across a range of company products, being overlooked, because some outpost of the empire has no incentive or means to share its know-how.

That is why Cobham, after its frenetic acquisition spree since the turn of the decade, is consolidating and becoming more corporate. Two low-margin businesses have been or are being off-loaded - flare-based countermeasures and fluid systems - and the company is appointing a chief technology officer, a head of procurement and a central marketing manager. It has also re-organised and renamed its divisional structure, a move perhaps made easier by the departure in the summer of the hugely-respected Geoff Cooper, who had run Cobham's old Chelton business as a semi-autonomous entity with its own identity after Cobham bought his company 16 years ago.

At a press lunch in London last week, Cobham bosses were keen to stress that it wasn't "becoming a Smiths" - a reference to a competitor that firmly stamps its corporate brand and ways of doing things through its entire global portfolio. "We haven't swung 180 degrees," said chief operating officer Andy Stevens. "We've maybe moved the pendulum 15 degrees." But for Cobham, most of whose companies do not even carry the Cobham brand, that shift is quite radical.