Operations in practice The troubled history of the Airbus A380

It is perhaps inevitable that a major new and complex product like a passenger aircraft will experience a
few problems during its development. But the history of the Airbus A380 was a long and incident-packed
journey from drawing board to reality that illustrates the dangers when the design activity goes wrong.
This is the story in brief. 1991 – Airbus consults with international airlines about their requirements for a
super-large passenger aircraft. January 1993 – Airbus rival Boeing says it has begun studies into ‘very
large’ commercial aircraft. June 1993 – Boeing decides not to go for a super-large passenger aircraft, but
instead to focus on designing smaller ‘jumbos’. Airbus and its partners set up the A3XX team to start the
‘super-jumbo’ project. 1996 – Airbus forms its ‘Large Aircraft’ Division. Because of the size of the
aircraft, it is decided to develop specially designed engines rather than adapt existing models. 2000 –
The commercial launch of the A3XX (later to be named the A380). 2002 – Work starts on manufacturing
the aircraft’s key components. February 2004 – Rolls-Royce delivers the first Airbus engines to the
assembly plant in Toulouse. April 2004 – The first Airbus wings are completed in the North Wales
factory. London’s Heathrow airport starts to redevelop its facilities so that it can accommodate the new
aircraft. May 2004 – Assembly begins in the Toulouse plant. December 2004 – EADS reveals the project
is A1.45 billion over budget, and will now cost more than A12 billion. January 2005 – Airbus unveils the
A380 to the world’s press and European leaders. 27 April 2005 – The aircraft makes its maiden flight,
taking off in Toulouse and circling the Bay of Biscay for four hours before returning to Toulouse. A year
of flight-testing and certification work begins. June 2005 – Airbus announces that the plane’s delivery
schedule will slip by six months. March 2006 – The plane passes important safety tests involving 850
passengers and 20 crew safely leaving the aircraft in less than 80 seconds with half the exits blocked.

July 2006 – The A380 suffers another production delay. Airbus now predicts a delay of a further six to
seven months. This causes turmoil in the boardrooms of both Airbus and its parent company EADS. The
company’s directors are accused of suppressing the news for months before revealing it to
shareholders. It leads to the resignations of Gustav Humbert, Airbus’ chief executive, Noel Forgeard,
EADS co-chief executive, and Charles Campion, the A380 programme manager. October 2006 – Airbus
infuriates customers by announcing yet a further delay for the A380, this time of a whole year. The first
plane is now forecast to enter commercial service around twenty months later than had been originally
planned. The delays will cost Airbus another estimated A4.8 billion over the next four years. The
company announces a drastic cost-cutting plan to try to recoup some of the losses. The Power8
programme is intended to ‘reduce costs, save cash and develop new products faster’. It wants to
increase productivity by 20% and reduce overheads by 30%. October 2007 – The super-jumbo eventually
takes off in full service as a commercial airliner for Singapore Airlines. It wins rave reviews from both
airlines and passengers – even if it is two years late! So what caused the delays? First, the A380 was the
most complex passenger jet ever to be built. Second, the company was notorious for its internal
rivalries, its constant need to balance work between its French and German plants so that neither
country had too obvious an advantage, constant political infighting, particularly by the French and
German governments, and frequent changes of management. According to one insider, ‘the underlying
reason for the mess we were in was the hopeless lack of integration [between the French and German
sides] within the company’. Even before the problems became evident to outsiders, critics of Airbus
claimed that its fragmented structure was highly inefficient and prevented it from competing effectively.
Eventually it was this lack of integration between design and manufacturing processes that was the main
reason for the delays to the aircraft’s launch. During the early design stages the firm’s French and
German factories had used incompatible software to design the 500 km of wiring that each plane needs.
Eventually, to resolve the cabling problems, the company had to transfer two thousand German staff
from Hamburg to Toulouse. Processes that should have been streamlined had to be replaced by
temporary and less efficient ones, described by one French union official as a ‘do-it-yourself system’.
Feelings ran high on the shopfloor, with tension and arguments between French and German staff. ‘The
German staff will first have to succeed at doing the work they should have done in Germany’, said the
same official. Electricians had to resolve the complex wiring problems, with the engineers having to
adjust the computer blueprints as they modified them so they could be used on future aircraft. ‘Normal
installation time is two to three weeks’, said Sabine Klauke, a team leader. ‘This way it is taking us four
months.’ Mario Heinen, who ran the cabin and fuselage cross-border division, admitted the pressure to
keep up with intense production schedules and the overcrowded conditions made things difficult. ‘We
have been working on these initial aircraft in a handmade way. It is not a perfectly organized industrial
process.’ But, he claimed, there was no choice. ‘We have delivered five high-quality aircraft this way. If
we had left the work in Hamburg, to wait for a new wiring design, we would not have delivered one by
now.’ But the toll taken by these delays was high. The improvised wiring processes were far more
expensive than the planned ‘streamlined’ processes and the delay in launching the aircraft meant two
years without the revenue that the company had expected. But Airbus was not alone. Its great rival,
Boeing, was also having problems. Engineers’ strikes, supply chain problems and mistakes by its own
design engineers had further delayed its ‘787 Dreamliner’ aircraft. Specifically, fasteners used to attach
the titanium floor grid, to the composite ‘barrel’ of the fuselage had been wrongly located, resulting in
8,000 fasteners having to be replaced. By 2009 it looked as if the Boeing aircraft was also going to be
two years late. At the same time, Airbus had finally moved to what it called ‘wave 2’ production where
the wiring harnesses that caused the problem were fitted automatically, instead of manually.