Recruitment and the environment will be key issues at Farnborough
DeeDee Doke/LONDON
Apart from serving as a global marketplace, Farnborough 2000 is providing a platform for the Society of British Aerospace Companies (SBAC) to promote two key themes dogging the aerospace industry: the recruitment of potential aerospace professionals and the environment. Typically, themes tied to trade shows are as quickly dispensed with as the bags filled with promotional materials that are distributed to visitors. But the organisation says it is committed to pressing these issues outside Farnborough's showcase environment.
Environmentally, "the industry is more or less at a crossroads. Where are we going?" asks John McClarty, the SBAC's technical operations manager, who heads the organisation's environmental promotion effort at the show.
The environmental impact of the 5% annual projected growth of air transport over the next 20 years is just one of the critical issues that industry and the public must grapple with in terms of "greening". McClarty says: "At Farnborough, we want to open up the debate. We have to join up with the government and the public and ask: how do we pull this together?"
"All the major industries are behind this," he adds. "They realise they have to address these issues, and they'd rather be in the forefront."
Within the UK, McClarty says the SBAC wants to "inform the agenda" of the major political parties so that aerospace industry issues such as the environment are on politicians' priority lists for action in time for next year's general election. "We've got to get in early. We want to be in front to inform our own government, but we recognise it [the environment] is a global issue. Eventually, there will be a global policy, and we want to inform that."
The Climate Change Levy is a key environmental issue on which the SBAC is eager to have its say. A charge is to be imposed from next April on industrial use of energy that is generated by non-renewable sources. Aerospace was not among the 10 industries to be offered rebates on the levy, which resulted from the UK Government's commitment to the 1997 Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 and 2012. The SBAC is concerned that the levy, designed to reduce the emissions by a minimum of 12%, will hamper UK aerospace industries' competitiveness - as well as its capacity to research and develop (R&D) new tools to safeguard the environment.
Environmental research
"They [the government] should be throwing R&D money our way to speed up the research and reduce the [industry's] environmental impact," McClarty says. "The industry has got to be encouraged."
Encouragement will also be aimed at potential aerospace recruits. The SBAC is promoting careers in aerospace during public days (29-30 July) at Farnborough, offering under-16s free admission (courtesy of Rolls-Royce), with "career experts" on hand to discuss their work and lifestyle and a "virtual career centre" with exhibits designed to appeal to young people.
"We recognise that careers in aerospace are an ongoing issue requiring continuous attention," says John Rex, the SBAC's People Management Programme manager. Rex compares recruitment for future aerospace workers to multi-year product development cycles: "The industry doesn't stand still. We need to recruit people to move it on now."
A point understood by industry, but less well outside aerospace, is that as well as engineers, other types of personnel are needed, such as in human resources, finance, marketing, environmental health and the full range of professions found in most businesses. Aerospace engineering's image in the UK, the SBAC says, suffers from a public perception of "poor pay and getting your hands dirty". The challenge is to make aerospace "sexy" once again "by raising its true, high-tech, modern profile", Rex says.
Companies including BAE Systems, Hunting, Lockheed Martin UK and Rolls-Royce are taking up the challenge by working with schools in their local communities and beyond to plant the seeds of interest in students and their teachers. BAE hopes to recruit 3,000 software and systems engineers over the next two years, plus a further 1,000 graduates. "Farnborough is the 'shop window', but it's only every two years," Rex says. Aerospace has already gripped the imagination of most visitors to the air show. Rex says: "You've got to capture the people who haven't thought about aerospace."
Source: Flight International
