Wednesday 4/10/2006

The Airbus A380 misery continues to spread, with Rolls-Royce now shutting down the Trent 900 engine production plant for a year. The A380 story is one of frustration all round; it flies fine and is progressing with reasonable dispatch through the various regulatory and approval processes: it's just that Airbus can't make the thing.

Wiring is the problem: the 300 miles of cable in each plane won't fit properly, in part because of the great variation between units — every airline can order customised in-flight entertainment systems — but mostly because the engineering centre in Hamburg is using different software from that at company HQ in Toulouse. As a result, changes made in one place haven't been properly assimilated at the other.

The reasons for this disastrous mismatch are hinted at in a piece from Bloomberg. The two centres are run by two different partners in the Airbus consortium and while the company has been trying very hard to get everyone unified, in this case there was considerable resistance from the engineers. That's because of inertia: once you've spent 10 years getting skilled at one particular software tool and you're doing a good job with it, you're going to react very badly to being told you have to change, go through retraining and spend at least a year getting up to speed, all because someone from another country says you must.

You know what engineers are like. You can imagine the rancour, especially in an European context where, nearly 50 years after the Treaty of Rome was signed, considerable national rivalry still pervades the Union. It must have seemed like the simplest thing all round at the time to accept the suppliers' assurances that sure, the data would be interchangeable instead of issuing a hard-line edict. As a result, Airbus is in a huge and possibly even fatal mess while Boeing is happily reclaiming its status as global leader in aviation.

I've seen some cross-country European ventures, occasionally from the inside, and I'm increasingly of the opinion that messing around in some sort of quantum state of indeterminate cohesion is deadly to the enterprise. Either everyone involved is a separate company, and deals with the partners with nearly the same remove as other clients and customers, or there's one company with a single approach and a pretty dictatorial management. Both approaches have their pitfalls, but nowhere near as nasty as those that come from spending enormous amounts of effort trying to maintain a state of internal friction.

That, I'm afraid, will never fly.