Do you remember the first time you flew? John Roberts can certainly recall his first time onboard an aircraft. “It would have been in 1970 on a Dan-Air BAC 111 from Gatwick to Basle,” he says. “I thought it was just magic.”
Roberts, chief engineer on the A380 superjumbo programme at Airbus, has subsequently kept records of every flight he has taken. These have included some rather unusual journeys on aircraft that had yet to enter service.
For instance he flew on the “third or fourth” flight of a redesigned Airbus A330-200, with refashioned wings, strengthened landing gear, and new wing skins. “We were out over the Pyrenees and they were doing stall testing. It was fabulous,” he says. “It comes back to the fact that you’ve helped to design this thing, and it’s doing what it’s supposed to. You get a kick out of that – and it’s a feeling I get today with the A380.”
Roberts, now in his late 50s, grew up in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, and was educated in Cheltenham. His grandfather was an engineer and had a workshop in the garage. From an early age, Roberts was fascinated by technology. The space race and innovations in the aviation industry in the 1960s held a special appeal.
“With the space programme, every few weeks there was something going on,” he recalls. “There was Concorde. The 747 was being built. I don’t think people today get that same vision.”
Roberts studied engineering at Brunel University in London and gained his initial work experience at Cheltenham’s then biggest engineering firm, the Dowty Group. Over the four years of his degree, he spent six months of each year in industry. He says this gave him a solid grounding in the realities of manufacturing and that there is a danger in looking at engineering too abstractly. “You could see that even when people started to transition into doing a lot of work in CAD, some became more remote from what things are actually like.
“I’ve noticed in the past few years that that has improved. But there was a period when people were stepping away from engineering. If you are going to be designing products, you have to have a real feel for it.”
Before joining Airbus, Roberts worked full-time at Dowty, where projects included introducing digital technology to aeroengines. He also worked on a contract to develop control equipment for Trafalgar-class submarines.
“That was a difficult project,” he recalls. “Nobody in the business wanted to do it. What I enjoyed about it was getting involved with the customer and explaining what you were going to do to make the thing work. That is one of the things I have always enjoyed in a job.”
Today, he says, airlines will come to him still if there is a problem. “I’d always encourage people coming through the business to take any opportunity to talk to airlines. Part of the challenge is understanding the reality of dealing with this stuff. If you’re in the engineering design office, there’s a danger of being a long way from the person who’s trying to get this airplane away at quarter to midnight.”
During his time in the aerospace industry, he has seen it expand in a way that was inconceivable when he was a youngster. “Heathrow was then a small provincial airport in terms of the amount of traffic,” he says. “If you think about the heyday of British aviation, making VC10s, the total production run was 50 or 60 – which is about the same number of aircraft Airbus makes each month now.”
Although only a relatively small number of VC10s were built, they proved durable, serving BOAC and other airlines from the 1960s to 1981. They were also used as strategic airlifters by the RAF, and ex-passenger models and others were used as aerial refuelling aircraft. The remaining two VC10 tankers made their final flights only in September last year. And during the life of the VC10, the industry completely changed.
Roberts says: “People forget the incredible growth there has been over my lifetime in commercial aviation. The fact that now people can afford to fly to places, and the sheer ease with which they can do it. In those days, if someone was flying, it was a big deal.”
The A380 is a modern-day big deal. The twin-deck superjumbo had to be squeezed into an 80m by 80m envelope – the maximum size at which a plane can be parked at an airport. The aircraft has a wingspan of just over 79m and is the world’s largest passenger airliner, with 40% more floor space than Boeing’s 747-8. The A380 can seat more than 840 people in an economy-class configuration. It entered commercial service just over six years ago.
A behemoth it may be but the pressure was on to slim it down as much as possible. “From an engineering point of view, a lot of the pressures in aerospace are environmental,” says Roberts. “The airline industry has made a commitment to reduce carbon emissions. It’s a socially responsible thing. But fuel is a huge part of running costs, so it is commercially sensitive, too. It is a win-win for the airlines. In the old days the drivers were about performance: you had to make the thing go further, faster.”
John Roberts
Roberts’ engineering teams worked to drive “every possible gram” out of the A380, partly through the use of advanced aluminium and composites. “If there’s 500 people on board, an extra kilo on each of them is half a tonne of payload. The A380 is clearly multiples of that,” he says. “Cutting weight and getting the fuel burn down, and therefore the cost of operating it, was the main driver.
“Making sure we had the right technology to get the weight down was no small achievement.”
Another focus was making the A380 quieter, he says. “The aircraft had to beat tough targets on noise. Heathrow has one of the toughest requirements in terms of approach and departure noise. We had to make sure the A380 could operate out of places like that easily. We also needed to make sure it was quiet on the inside and therefore compatible with the rest of the family.”
The engineers were aware that they were working on a potentially iconic project, so reliability and customer appeal were even more important than usual, he says. “The marketing guys and customers will be asking for the impossible – and the engineers will be in a panic.”
He adds: “It’s not an aeroplane you can hide if something happens. If you ask the public, aircraft are relatively similar in appearance – but the A380 is one that everyone recognises. That adds more pressure in terms of getting it right. It is a different aeroplane.”
Not everything has gone right. In the most serious incident involving Airbus’s new jet, the first A380 to be delivered to Australian airline Qantas experienced failure of one of its Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines on a flight over Indonesia in 2010. Although catastrophe was averted, the accident led to a row between Rolls-Royce and the airline, the withdrawal from service of some of the fleet, and modification of some Trent 900 engines. Rolls-Royce ultimately paid Qantas more than £60 million in compensation.
Airbus also discovered problems with some of the brackets used on the A380’s wings, after cracking was found as a direct result of the Qantas engine failure investigation.
Roberts says the Qantas blowout was “fascinating from an airframe point of view, but a frightening event”. “Designing an aeroplane for that event, dealing with an uncontained engine failure, is a fundamental requirement. That defines how fuel tanks are separated, how you separate wiring harnesses, and so on, but you can’t test it,” he says.
“When it happened, we had to look at the wing and understand exactly what had occurred, because we wanted to ensure all our modelling was right. And it turned out to be. The other bit that occurred is that we found these cracks, which could not be explained by the event. My view is that demonstrates how robust our processes are.” In short, the engine failure incident led to the discovery of a problem that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, he says.
Orders record: Airbus has clinched deals to sustain more than eight years of production
Airbus is retrofitting older A380s with more robust aluminium brackets on some ribs, and has included the design on all aircraft built since the first quarter of last year. The move is adding 90kg of additional weight, according to some reports. “If you look at why aviation is safer than it’s ever been, it’s because it learns from experience,” says Roberts.
Airbus has received more than 250 orders for the A380 and delivered 119 planes, most of which have gone to the airline Emirates. Roberts says aeroplanes are starting to creep up in size. “The number of people wanting to fly around the world is going up. The only way to fulfil that is to move more people at one time. If you look at the Asian market, which is where a lot of these aircraft are going, the number of people who want to fly is going up so rapidly that you have to use the A380 to satisfy demand.”
Roberts is clear that it is engineering that has allowed Airbus to flourish over the decades. “That’s what fundamentally makes the difference.” He looks for certain qualities in aeronautical engineers. “They need to have a passion for the subject,” he says. “They also need to understand that we are a safety-driven industry.
“If things go wrong, people will get hurt, so you have to have engineers who understand the consequences of what they are doing. I’m not saying other industries don’t have similar constraints, but this is a flying machine and you need to understand it.”
Does he still get involved in engineering at a practical level? “I get involved on the technical side still. I occasionally do sums, usually to make sure that I agree when somebody has told me the answer is ‘X’. Computers are very good at coming up with long answers; sometimes you have to make sure the first number is right.”
But he says he is careful not to control his engineering teams too closely: “You have to give people the opportunity to do things themselves. If nobody’s going to make a decision without coming to me, things aren’t going to work.”
At Airbus, he enjoys the interaction between experienced engineers and their counterparts in their twenties or thirties. “You need younger people in your business – the people who are challenging established ways of doing things. On the other side, you need people with experience, people who have had their fingers burnt on previous programmes. It’s a marriage of the two, and doing it without either side becoming dominant is the key skill.
“People in their twenties and thirties need to feel they are pushing the system a little bit. It’s how to do that in a controlled way that is key.”
He knows that he will in all likelihood not work on a new commercial aircraft programme for Airbus. “I’m 58, so in my working career there will not be another A380. But there will be evolutions.” For example, the A380 had a slight increase in take-off weight approved last year, so it can carry more cargo. There has also been a small change to its wing twist to improve aerodynamics. Meanwhile the A330, which came into service in 1994, is on its fourth major revision, adds Roberts. “I still think I’ve got the best job in the factory,” he says. “When you don’t get a kick out of work, it’s time to stop.”
Flying has opened up from being the preserve of the elite to being available to many, he says. “It has changed the way in which the world thinks. The fact that people can easily go and see what people are like in other parts of the world is an incredible change. That’s what aviation has done, and I get a kick out of it – although the challenges are different from what they were.”
In terms of engineering at Airbus, he adds: “The longer anybody spends doing a particular thing, the less likely they are to challenge whether they are doing it right.
“But innovation comes from anybody. Innovation is almost like a natural phenomenon but organisations can stop it. From good engineers, it’s natural.”
Taking shape: Roberts and his engineering team worked hard to keep the A380’s weight down
Europe’s challenge to the US giants
The origins of Airbus can be traced back to 1967, when ministers from the UK, Germany and France agreed, “for the purpose of strengthening European co-operation in aviation technology and promoting economic and technological progress, to take appropriate measures for the development and production of an airbus”.
In 1969 French transport minister Jean Chamant and German economics minister Karl Schiller signed an agreement to launch the A300, the world’s first twin-engine widebody passenger jet. At the time it was thought that only three-engine aircraft could safely serve long-range routes.
The A300 was to be built by a French-German consortium which would also involve the British and the Dutch, and the decision to give the go-ahead for the aircraft was the formal starting point for the Airbus programme. The A300’s first flight took place in 1972.
Today, Airbus employs 63,000 people at 16 sites in France, Germany, the UK and Spain. Final assembly is based in Toulouse, France; Hamburg, Germany; Seville, Spain; and, since 2009, Tianjin, China. Airbus has subsidiaries in the US, Japan, China and India.
Airbus has about half the global commercial aircraft market. The company was set up to provide a European answer to US giants such as Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed. Development of the A380, the world’s largest passenger airliner, began in secret in the late 1980s as a direct challenge to the dominance of Boeing’s 747 in the jumbo jet market.
Airbus’s A320 was notable for being the first civilian jet to use a fly-by-wire control system. The aircraft has been a great commercial success, and has shortened derivatives in the A318 and A319, with some of the latter under construction for the corporate business jet market. A stretched version is known as the A321. The A320 family’s primary competitor is the Boeing 737.
The longer-range widebody products, the twin-jet A330 and the four-engine A340, have efficient wings, enhanced by winglets. The Airbus A340-500 has an operating range of 16,700km, the second-longest of any commercial jet after the Boeing 777-200LR.
Airbus is studying a replacement for the A320 series, tentatively dubbed New Short-Range aircraft. Those studies indicate a maximum fuel efficiency gain of 9-10%. The company has also opted to enhance the existing A320 design using new winglets and aerodynamic improvements. This enhanced A320 should have a fuel-efficiency improvement of 4-5%, shifting the launch of a replacement for the aircraft to at least 2017.
Boosted by new business announced during the Dubai air show, Airbus registered orders for 108 commercial jets last November – bringing its overall backlog to what it claimed was an industry record of more than 5,400 aircraft, representing eight-plus years of sustained production. Fifty eight aircraft were delivered in November, taking total deliveries for the first 11 months of 2013 to 562, for 90 customers. This was a 9% increase on the same period in 2012, said Airbus.
The company’s global market forecast for 2013-32 anticipates that air traffic will grow at 4.7% annually, requiring more than 29,220 new passenger aircraft and freighters at a value of nearly $4.4 trillion.