Onboard the A350 XWB, the latest aircraft from European aircraft manufacturer Airbus, we are somewhere above the Pyrenees. The pilot encourages the passengers to look out of the window and post photographs on social media.
A French Rafale jet fighter swoops in to travel alongside the left side of our test aircraft and then moves to the right side. An aviation journalist from China is either crumpled under foot or faints with excitement, it's hard to tell which.
The A350 is carrying 150 journalists from across the world, the first people external to Airbus to travel on the aircraft. The one hour trip is an unscheduled charm-offensive during an otherwise well-scripted international press conference, to counter the bad news that Emirates, one of the first customers for the aircraft, has cancelled an order for seventy A350s.
The cancellation is the biggest in the company's history and a blow to the A350 programme, which represents a number of technological firsts for Airbus. The headline innovation is that 53% of the A350 is made from composite materials, the most in any commercial passenger aircraft. When combined with the Trent XWB engines from Rolls-Royce, Airbus claims that the reduction in weight and increase in performance reduces fuel burn by 25%.
The A350 is the first aircraft to feature Airbus sharklets on its wingtips to improve aerodynamic performance and reduce fuel burn
When the A350 enters into service later this year it will directly compete with Boeing's 787 Dreamliner. The 787, which carries a similar amount of unproven technology, entered service in 2011. It has experienced problems with battery fires that resulted in the entire fleet being temporarily grounded in 2013. Emirates' cancellation has been partly attributed to the risk associated with being the first operator of an aircraft that has unproven technology. Customers want “mature” aircraft. Perversely, it can be said that one of the effects of the 787's battery fires is the reconsidering of the A350 order against the now more-proven Dreamliner.
As well as showing how fierce the competition is in the global aviation market, the A350 Emirates' cancellation is also a good indicator of the increasing pressure aerospace engineers are under to get their product to market quickly. Nowhere is this more apparent than with certification and testing. Fernando Alonso, senior vice president of flight and integration tests, Airbus, says his objective was to certify the A350 in just 14 months, a massive challenge when there are demands from customers who require maturity alongside ever-increasing technical complexity. The A350 testing programme measures 670 000 parameters and is creating 53 terabytes of data.
Alonso says: “The purpose is always to test as much as possible upstream, to discover problems as early as possible and reduce the amount of flight testing we have to do. You need to fly to measure the performance of the aircraft, but everything else can be tested on the ground.”
Large components such as landing gear, wings and engine are therefore tested in rigs. As much climatic testing as possible is also done on the ground, and the A350 was the first Airbus aircraft to be tested at the McKinley Climatic Chamber in Florida, USA. Alonso says: “We were there for two weeks and tested at plus thirty degrees in 90% humidity and dry air at 45 degrees, and then -30 and -40 degrees when we started the engine. I can tell you the engines started pretty well.”
Eventually though, flight testing has to be conducted, and as of this month the A350 has clocked up 2000 hours in the air. During flight testing an instrumentation control station at the rear of the aircraft acts as the “brain” and links to the cockpit, says Patrick du Che, head of development for flight test for Airbus. On board our test A350 above the Pyrenees, he is surrounded by that “brain” - an array of screens displaying numerical and graphical data, cables trailing all over the cabin to sensors protruding out of seats and side panels. “We've been making good progress on the A350 programme,” he says. “Yes, we've found problems, but if we didn't find anything wrong we would be suspicious.”
The instrumentation panel on the fourth test A350 aircraft displays data from sensors throughout the cabin
The team is in the middle of fire suppressant tests, which are mostly conducted on the ground, says Sandra Bour-Schaeffer, project flight test engineer for Airbus. There are four test A350 aircraft. Two are fully kitted out with sensors permanently to measure load, stress, pressure and temperature throughout the aircraft. The other two are kept lighter and dedicated to the cabin, to test for things like noise and air quality. She says: “We can control almost anything from the station here, even the engines to simulate stalls during flight.”
Airbus expects certification of the A350 XWB within months, in time for the first delivery to Qatar Airways before the end of this year. This will signal the start of the ramp up of a complex international manufacturing operation spread across the world involving tens of thousands of engineers and suppliers. The Airbus A380, for example, consists of four million components from 1500 companies in 30 different countries. Simon Ward, vice president of international cooperation, Airbus, says: “I still think it's a miracle that these parts come together to make a flying machine that goes in one piece to the customer.”
Airbus was originally a political construct between France, UK, Germany and Spain to supply commercial passenger aircraft to Europe and retain expertise in the sector. Almost 45 years after its creation, some 90% of its orders now come from outside of Europe. The company's market is shifting East.
However, organisationally, Airbus has to deal with the legacy issues of its setup. The biggest of these issues is the multinational spread of its engineering and manufacturing facilities. However, Moore says that this spread is also an advantage, in that the company is accustomed to multi-location working and the logistics of moving large amounts of work around. “We can spread the risk. It comes down to 44 years of experience of packaging work and moving it around, which we can do better than Boeing,” he says.
As well as strategic market access, Moore says its increasing growth outside of Europe lets Airbus tap into a wider pool of engineering talent, raw materials, find the most effective cost base and limit its exposure to financial fluctuations in things like currency rates.
As the company's customers have shifted, so has its industrial footprint - from Europe into Asia, Russia and the Far East, says Moore. Both the US and China now have final component assembly lines, where one complete part of an aircraft, such as wingsets in China, is completed. China also has a final assembly line for the A320 aircraft. In the last three years the factory has delivered 170 aircraft.
The trend for Airbus to outsource to Asia is growing at pace. In 2006, only 2% of the company's outsourcing was in Asia. By 2012 it had risen to 11%. Moore says: “By 2020 a conservative estimate is that outsourcing will have doubled again. But there are no losers, the market will also increase, which can be difficult to explain to our home countries. There is plenty of cake to go around. If we did nothing in China, it wouldn't stop China becoming an aviation player in the future.”
Airbus' Chinese manufacturing model is now being “copy pasted to the US”, says Moore. An A320 final assembly line is expected to be finished in Alabama next year. The plant was part of a €12bn spend in the US last year. The US also hosts Airbus' largest training centre outside of Toulouse and the company employs 600 engineers at its head office in Wichita, Kansas. “When we go into production early next year, the US will be on a par with China. We don't see the US as the enemy. Does the US see us as an enemy? You will have to ask them,” asks Moore rhetorically.
The interior of the A350 has been designed to give wider seats and more leg room while maximising passenger capacity
But, the duopoly Airbus enjoys with Boeing is coming to an end. China continues to invest heavily in its efforts to establish a domestic aircraft manufacturer. Most industry experts predict it will take up to 25 years for China or another region to produce a significant competitor to Airbus / Boeing. The change is inevitable, and although the duopoly shapes the way the company develops and markets products today, Moore believes its multiculturalism will stand in good stead when international competition from China, Russia or South America eventually increases. “You have to think long term in aerospace. We're not afraid because we have a good product range and a good market position,” he says. “But, we also have a very diverse cultural background. There are 52 different national backgrounds in the company and years of experience dealing with that. This mean problem solving may take longer but you end up with a better solution.
“Internationalisation of Airbus is inevitable. It's not going to go away. But we are European at heart, and we have to maintain our footprint there,” he says.
It's difficult not to be impressed, by the relative quietness, space and comfort on board the A350 – and by the Rafale jet zooming around. Like Airbus itself, it feels distinctly European, but behind the scenes, the development and manufacturing is increasingly global.
View of the Trent XWB engine and the Pyrenees from the Airbus A350 test aircraft