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Aviation History
1993
1993 - 0022.PDF
INDUSTRY DOUBTS Germany, the industrial heart of Europe, is not proving to be immune to recession. Douglas Barrie visits a major aircraft-engine maintenance plant in the old East Germany andfinds that, despite low costs, updating, cuts and investment, life is still a fight. G ermany is beginning to experi ence the real costs of re unification at a bad time — when the world's economy as a whole is depressed. Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the central Bundesbank are now struggling to put the economy together again. Re-unification has proved bitter-sweet for the German aerospace industry. While the new Lander (the eastern states) provide a gateway to eastern Europe and there is a large and comparatively cheap skilled labour force, the development demands on Government funds have squeezed military- procurement programmes particularly hard. The majority of German voters see the collapse of the old Warsaw Pact as a reason to reduce massively Germany's military commitments and thus costs. The German Government has looked to its industrialists to help forge the new Germany by investing in the east, with little prospect of short-term returns. Deutsche Aerospace (DASA), reflecting its position as a flagship company, has bought factories in the former East Germany at Dresden and Ludwigsfelde. Dresden is the site of Elbe Flugzeugwerke, which is now part of Deutsche Aerospace Airbus, while Lud wigsfelde is now in the hands of DASA's engine manufacturer, MTU. MILITARY PAST The former Luftfahrt Technik Ludwigsfelde had specialised for 30 years in both fixed- and rotary-wing engine overhaul for the East German air force. The site, some 25km south of Berlin, typifies aerospace industrial plants devel oped under the old East German regime. The engine-maintenance site sprawls over some 70,000m2, with eight engine-test cells. Karlheinz Koch, MTU general manager of logistics support, explains the rationale behind the purchase: "We took over some 15 months ago, in principle, without any business since all the old contracts had been inter rupted in mid-1990. The concept is to make Lud wigsfelde the small- engine maintenance centre." MTU Hanover will specialise in large- engine maintenance, with MTU Munich fo cusing on military turbofans, and older civil-engine designs. When the Treuhandanstalt (the Govern ment body responsible for administering the sale of East Germany's nationalised industrial base) took on Ludwigsfelde, the plant had a workforce of 1,000. This has now fallen to 350, with the majority of positions sustained by work transferred from MTU sites in western Germany. MTU's strategy for the plant was to use the experience it had achieved from work ing with Soviet engines to provide a baseline, while also using it as the site for its customer service centre (CSC), set up in conjunction with US engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney. In developing the CSC site at Ludwigsfelde, MTU gutted and rede signed the existing building — which had been erected only in 1988 — providing the CSC with some 5,500m2. The company has a "strategic alliance" with P&W. Koch estimates that 40% of Ludwigsfelde's work will come through the CSC, while the other 60% will be made up of a mix of work transferred from its other plants and the maintenance of Russian helicopter engines. "We transferred work from Hanover and Munich to keep the shop-floor people here," says Koch. "We transferred work on the General Electric T64 [turboshaft] from Munich. Munich now only does component repair and final New customers, old site, at Ludwigsfelde (top) tests on this engine. We are also doing component repair on the GEJ79 [fighter jet engine]," he adds. Both engine-repair and maintenance pro grammes are courtesy of the German armed forces. The T64 powers the army's Sikorsky CH-53G heavy-transport helicopters, while the GE J79 powers the air force's McDon nell Douglas F-4F Phantoms. Transferring additional work may prove to be more difficult. MTU, like other DASA companies, has been hit by the slowdown 20 FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 6 - 12 January, 1993
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