Actualités Airbus

Vector a écrit:JP, malgré ta pneumonie, tu as raison pour la concurrence des ERJ. Ce que je voulais dire, c'est que l'arrivée d'un nouveau concept (A320 et B737 remotorisés) provoque un certain attentisme de la part de toutes les compagnies qui considèrent leur rentabilité à long terme.
C'est sans doute pour cela que les dirigeants d'Airbus est très hésitants à l'idée de remotoriser l'A330.
À titre de comparaison, dans le secteur des télécommunications, les ordinateurs ont fait une entrée discrète dans les centraux téléphoniques. Tous les équipements étaient électromécaniques, mais il semblait logique de les commander à l'aide d'un programme informatique.
Un seul fabricant, Northern Telecom, alias Nortel, a fait le saut directement en commutant les conversations dans un ordinateur, comme des messages numériques. Du jour au lendemain, ils ont tué leur marché de base électromécanique, mais ont créé un marché mondial pour leurs centraux électroniques. Qu'ils ne l'aient pas vraiment fait exprès est peu important, le résultat est qu'une technologie nouvelle peut prendre le marché à la hussarde. Voir les ambitions du B787...
De mémoire, c'est la théorie de l'innovation d'un nommé Schumpeter et en anglais, on parle du "new kid on the block".

Airbus CEO Fabrice Bregier has announced significant changes to the Airbus organization on the eve of the ILA air show in Berlin, signaling a shift from previous centralization policies.

Bregier plans to give greater empowerment to facilities and local plants in an effort to speed up processes. Details of the initiative are to be presented to the company’s various works councils next week. The reorganization is to be implemented on Jan. 1, 2013.

“Airbus has become too big, too complex,” Bregier said at a company event in Berlin on Sept. 10. “We need to become simpler and we need to make decisions faster. This is a weakness of Airbus.”

The initiative is the first major change that Bregier has unveiled since he took the helm of Airbus in June, replacing Tom Enders. It is also somewhat of a departure from the centralization strategy that Airbus has been following since 2007. Following the disastrous production problems surrounding the A380, the company concluded that more integration and centralization was needed to avoid similar problems in the future. But Bregier believes that “once you have centralized, you can afford to relax a bit.”

The various Airbus plants are at the heart of the changes. “A plant will no longer be a plant, but a business unit,” Bregier explains. The heads of the various Airbus facilities will be empowered to act within their given budgets and without moving away from common standards or the common IT infrastructure, the lack of which has been a root cause of the A380 production problems.

Bregier says that facility heads will in the future be allowed to allocate engineering resources at their own discretion within the given frame, whereas now any shift of manpower would require agreement by several company-wide departments.

“With Airbus’ current decision making process, you can easily lose 3-6 months,” Bregier complains. The changes are intended to smooth routine operations and change the management of legacy programs in particular, but they are also intended as a change in company culture. “We want to recreate the sense of operating as multifunctional teams on a local level,” Bregier says.

China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), one of China’s biggest energy companies and Airbus are developing and promoting renewable aviation fuel production for regular commercial use in China.
Sinopec is the instrumental partner in helping the Central Government to establish a Chinese airworthiness certification for alternative aviation fuels made from locally grown feedstocks.
The certified fuel known as “1# bio-jetfuel” will be produced by Sinopec using its own technology in a newly built refinery in Hangzhou (near Shanghai). The refinery is one of the few in the world that has the capacity to produce aviation fuel from biomass in large-scale.
Airbus is supporting the development of the Chinese standard with technical expertise gained in past certification processes with the European Union and US fuels standards bodies and in the selection of sustainable feedstocks.
“Bio-jetfuel is becoming increasingly important in aviation and the energy market. It will help aviation grow sustainably and demand for fuel increase. Sinopec has developed its own technology for producing aviation fuel from biomass and waste oil and has already produced aviation fuel meeting international standards. Sinopec is assisting CAAC (Civil Aviation Administration of China) in the airworthiness certification process and is proud to be collaborating with Airbus and other partners in the push for alternative aviation fuels,” said DAI Houliang, SVP of Sinopec.
In addition to fuel certification, the partners are also establishing a sustainable alternative fuel value chain in China, to help speed up its commercialisation, and will use 100 per cent domestic resources and refining capabilities.
“Bio-fuels are a crucial part of the roadmap to meet aviation ambitious CO2 targets. We are privileged to be working with our Chinese partners to establish a domestic value chain in China which is 100 percent Chinese,” said Laurence Barron, President of Airbus China.
Airbus currently supports alternative fuel value chains in Australia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East.