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Aviation History
1975
1975 - 2026.PDF
474 BRITAIN'S AEROSPACE INDUSTRY borough, employs a 5,000+ workforce and has an annual budget of £20 million. Although in recent years there has been an attempt to swing research towards subjects with direct industrial applications, a great fund of basic research with long-term significance is still carried out. The budget and workforce has been trimmed during the last five years, as have the numbers employed in research by the private sector of the industry. A particularly important task for the EEC, and perhaps one of the most difficult because of its association with military projects, is the setting of guide lines for a co-ordinated programme of research. Twelve UK universities, two technical colleges and one post-graduate institute provide a flow of graduate aero nautical engineers, not only for the home industry but also in increasing numbers for "export." A number of estab lishments provide training for professional pilots and at least one expects that foreign nationals will account for 95 per cent of its intake next year (see Flight for July 24, page 129). The British industry's labour force splits approximately equally between the three sections, aircraft, engines and equipment, and this underlines the British claim that it 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 Year 72 73 74 75 F/'g /, left, gives exports as published by the SBAC and is calculated from HM Customs returns of the notional value of hardwear leaving UK ports, It includes engines and equip ment being returned to overseas owners after overhaul or re pair, as well as parts for collaborative pro jects. Fig 2, right, shows employment, according to Depart ment of Employment definition MLH 383, rounding out at just above 200,000. Brit ons account for about 50 per cent of the EEC aerospace work force FLIGHT International, 2 October 1975 The EEC figures which the British believe to be mislead ing are those comparing turnover with employment (see. Table 1) and showing UK productivity to be the lowest in Europe. It is obviously unfair to compare the productivity, based on turnover, of two workers if one is employed by a company which buys all its components from outside and just carries out final assembly, while the other works for a company which makes everything in-house (see leading article in Flight for August 14). Yet this is precisely what the EEC report has done. The EEC figures have been taken from The European Aerospace Industry: Position and Figures", which has been widely circulated within the European industry. It is believed that Position and Figures will be used as a basic source of data for the coming EEC policy document; it was quoted at the Flight /Financial Times Conference in Paris in May by M Charles Cristofini, chairman of the board of Aerospatiale. Flight asked Profes sor S. B. Saul, of the Department of Economic History at the University of Edinburgh, to comment on the EEC com parison: "Some years ago a report on the European aero space industry made by the Italian organisation Soris criticised the low productivity of the British industry. In an article in Flight for January 20, 1972, I pointed out the weaknesses and inaccuracies of the measurement em ployed and concluded that the correct figures showed only a slight difference between the French and British indus tries as far as labour productivity was concerned. "The recent statistics on productivity calculated by the EEC (see Table 1) have been used again to point to the peculiarly low productivity of British industry. Only offic ials who are wholly statistically illiterate would think of using figures of sales per person—or gross output—as indicative of productivity. The overwhelming disadvantage of such a measure is that gross figures make no allowance for the use of bought-out items. Apart from the confusions caused by transfer within any industry, each country imports parts of airframes and complete engines and equipment to different degrees and this obviously will greatly affect the meaning of sales of final output. It is well is the only industry ouside the US and Bussia covering the complete range of aerospace technology. The airframe sector in France employs only 10,000 fewer people than its British counterpart but the engine and equipment sectors are just one-third the size of the British. The British and French airframe workforces are each larger than the complete German industry, while in the US some 95,000 persons are employed entirely on space work, more than the UK airframe-sector total and about equal to the French aerospace industry total. Apart from Shorts, Bolls-Boyce (1971) is the only British company with any direct experience of Government con trol. Happily, there seems to be little evidence of any blunting of that company's commercial edge and at least one major overseas customer has told Flight that service has improved since the events of 1971. No less than 300 British companies are members of the SBAC (see page 489), supplying everything from rivets to complete aircraft. The reduction in membership in recent years reflects the number of consolidations that have taken place rather than any decline in capability. The power given by the proposed "British Aerospace" Bill to the re sponsible Minister to diversify out of airframes into the equipment sector is one of the principal worries of many SBAC members. known that the French engine and, above all, equipment sectors are much weaker than the British. The same EEC report shows that in 1972 UK engine sales were 130 per cent higher than the French figure, while those of equip ment were four times as great. Yet French airframe out put was larger than British production. It is obvious that the bought-in element in French sales was much larger than in the British total. This is clearly even more true for the other countries, above all the Netherlands, which has no engine or equipment-sector sales recorded. Yet the figures for sales-per-person-employed assume that the ratio of net to gross output is the same for each country, some thing that is palpably not the case. That French "produc tivity" as measured this way remained static between 1969 and 1972 while the Dutch achievement rose by one-third means absolutely nothing. It probably reflects almost entirely some shifts in the gross-to-net ratios. "The only figures worth using are those showing value added per person, for these eliminate all bought-in ele ments as well as making allowance for changes in work in progress. They have weaknesses of their own but are * The European Aerospace Industry—Position and Figures (III/956/74-E) is the third revision of a set of statistics prepared by the EEC Commission on the European aerospace industry. According to the EEC, the document is intended as a "first important foundation" for the compilation of "an initial overall report on the conditions of operation of the aeronautical construction industry of the Community and on the measures necessary for its development."
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