A350 begins fuselage construction, refines program management

Airbus has begun construction of the A350 fuselage.

Airbus photo, rendering

Airbus also announced refinements in the A350 program management to provide more accountability and coordination. This article describes it in Aviation Week, by Robert Wall.

In a blog by Wall, who has a good sense of humor, the post takes a bit of a tongue-in-check view of management changes. He ends it with, “Skeptics quip that Airbus is effectively fighting the last war, and that the only thing it is assuring is that it will invent a whole new series of missteps. If that turns out to be true, then perhaps it is time to put to bed the idea of accelerating development cycles on major products and just learn to live with the fact that the gestation period for a major civil aircraft program is eight years or longer.”

Airbus previously acknowledged that entry-into-service will be delayed from the first half of 2013 to the second half. Ascend data base at November 30 listed the first delivery in August 2013, with only five airplanes scheduled at this time for delivery in 2013.

6 Comments on “A350 begins fuselage construction, refines program management

  1. Boeing first scorned Airbus for its widespread adoption of FBW then followed it albeit with a 30 year delay…

    Boeing first scorned Airbus for its widespread use of composites in its aircrafts ever since the early 70′s then adopted them also…

    Boeing first scorned Airbus for its production system of shipping premade sections from different countries at one final assembly facility and then adopted it albeit with disastrous results…

    Want to know what future Boeing aircraft and production methods would be like?
    Just look at what Airbus is doing today!

    • IMHO Boeing has proven to be unable to build planes in a way that requires longtime rigorous preplanning that heeds all contigencies and that moves
      most unknown unknows into preparatory experimentation and not fixups on the final
      product.

      And up to now there is not much “learning” visible in that respect,
      each and every time rushing forward on a path until a hard stop is
      encountered ( just to keep up appearances for shareholder value pimping?).

  2. @PlaneMad + Uwe
    Always keep the ‘big picture’ in mind.
    I find it useless to blame Boeing for being too conservative and/or lacking innovation, as Boeing is simply representing the average US american corporate philosophy, which is dictated by the generally shortsighted US economy going for fast profits and as high as possible return-on-investment ratio.
    There are only some minor Boeing specific quirks (e.g. that stalinist-propaganda like corporate communication and PR strategy).
    It is this US economic philosphy in general causing why the US unemployment numbers are still rising beyond official 9.8% (in reality 22.7% along Shadowstats.com) and US food stamp program (nutrition for the poor) participation is rising with 500’000 additional participants per month (42.9 million participants in September 2010), the US having the most prisoners per capita of the world with more than 720 (mostly male) prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants (and rising), while at the same time the US are hiking their military budget by $31 billion to $160 billion in 2011, and spending for their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has already surpassed $1.1 trillion and is continuously rising with $100 billion per month.
    I don’t see any ‘change’ in US economy as promised by president Obama.
    It’s still the same mad old suicide economy of the Bush era.

    • Well, basically my core issue with Boeing is lack of modern design starnards conforming professionalism. A judicious amount of hobbyists are more professional.

      It is completely unacceptable to have no relationship of valid trust with partners/suppliers and
      it is unacceptable to find major problems by chance and misshap and not via rigorous testing.
      This is a complete NoNo.

  3. Corrigenda: Prisoner numbers given by me are way too low.
    Let’s listen to a professional in this field, University of Princeton philosopher
    Kwame Anthony Appiah:
    “Roughly 1 percent of adults in this country (USA) are incarcerated. We have 4 percent of the world’s population (312 million inhabitants in 2009) but 25 percent of its prisoners. No other nation has as large a proportion of its population in prison; even China’s rate is less than half of ours. What’s more, the majority of our prisoners are non-violent offenders, many of them detained on drug charges. (Whether a country that was truly free would criminalize recreational drug use is a related question worth pondering).
    And the full extent of the punishment prisoners face isn’t detailed in any judge’s sentence. More than 100,000 inmates suffer sexual abuse, including rape, each year; some contract HIV as a result. Our country holds at least 25,000 prisoners in isolation in so-called supermax facilities, under conditions that many psychologists say amount to torture.”
    Yeah, yeah, yeah, United States of America, “The Land of the Free”…

  4. And this one on the costs of the US correctional system in 2008, NYT, by Solomon Moore:
    ” One in Every 31 Adults in Prison; Prison Spending Outpaces All but Medicaid
    One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008, according to a new study …”
    Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/us/03prison.html

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