How Airbus took off
worksinprogress.co159 points by JumpCrisscross 2 days ago
159 points by JumpCrisscross 2 days ago
I worked for Airbus a long time ago, and obviously I have some rose-tinted glasses, but what stands out in my memories:
- While the French and Germans love to hate each other, they culturally complement each other very well. I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project (and yes, the UK and Spain are also part of Airbus but are much less visible)
- Despite being a highly political entity, you wouldn’t feel any of that day to day. Even up to the highest management levels, it felt like an engineering company focused on incredibly hard engineering challenges. Every once in a while, there was fighting over which country would get which work share for a new project, but it felt more like internal teams pushing their pet peeves rather than external political influence
- It was a truly international company. My first team had eight colleagues based in four countries. To make it all work, they had some very early video conferencing systems where the equipment would take up entire side rooms.
How would you say their cultures compliment each other? I would be interested to hear more concrete, and especially how it ends up when you mix them.
French engineers were known for their willingness to embrace advanced, high-risk technologies to gain a decisive advantage in the aerospace market.
French influence drove Airbus's early focus on understanding customer needs and adapting to market requirements. Early on, the company adopted English as its working language and U.S. measurements to appeal to a wider range of airline customers.
German engineers brought a reputation for meticulous attention to detail, efficiency, and robust industrial processes, ensuring reliable and high-quality production.
Germany's strong engineering foundation provided the technical discipline needed to standardize components and organize the complex cross-border manufacturing process.
Yes. Also the way how internal collaboration works. A lot of focus on relationship building and pre-alignments vs a content-first approach („people will accept it if it’s just correct enough“). In any real-world situation that matters it will always take a bit of both
There was that problem with CAD software on the A380: German teams used CATIA version 4, while French had upgraded to version 5, resulting in incompatibilities.
"By late autumn, a team of around 200 German mechanics was in Toulouse along with several hundred kilometers of electrical cables to be installed in the first planes. But after weeks of painstakingly threading thousands of veins of copper and aluminum wire around the walls and floor panels of the airframes, the teams had run into a maddening snag: the cables were too short.
"The wiring wasn't following the expected routing through the fuselage, so when we got to the end they weren't long enough to meet up with the connectors on the next section," said one German mechanic, who said he arrived in Toulouse in early 2005. He asked not to be identified out of fear that he might lose his job. "The calculations were wrong," he said. "Everything had to be ripped out and replaced from scratch." --- nytimes https://archive.vn/uLIqa#selection-603.204-617.419
Mistakes happen on large, highly complex projects involving multiple teams in multiple locations ?
Colour me surprised !
> Early on, the company adopted English as its working language and U.S. measurements to appeal to a wider range of airline customers.
Airbus uses US measurements - i.e., not the metric system?
They use SAE nuts and bolts. "Society of Automotive Engineers and refers to the system of inch-based fasteners used primarily in North America"
Is that the standard in the airline industry? For example, does Embraer use SAE too? Lockheed (I thought the US military used metric)?
Dunno. My info's from https://www.reddit.com/r/aviationmaintenance/comments/botlch...
Update - google says Embraer uses SAE. Apparently Airbus helicopters are metric though.
What’s your source for that? It reads like a cliché, especially when you know about the arguably stronger engineering background in France when it comes to aerospace.
Seconding this, I'm Dutch and I still struggle to see how they'd complement each other.
In France we're creative but sloppy, in Germany they care about the process too much but they don't deviate from plans. It's nice to have both: what's the point of following the plan if the entire project is pointless ? French people would challenge early and often, while germans would implement correctly and to the letter.
I really feel we complement each other, each time I work with germans they fix my tendency to be quick and dirty and I push them to accelerate and take shortcuts when they make sense.
Your note on politics is interesting because my anecdotal experience was quite different.
I worked at an Airbus offshoot in Silicon Valley and my visit to Toulouse for a bunch of meetings with the teams working on new tech and AI things were somewhat shocking.
The amount of sniping in meetings, and the amount of post-meeting behind the back sniping was somewhat shocking.
This was somewhat mirrored to a lesser extent even in our videoconf meetings and other collaborations.
It left me wondering how a group of people who seem to think so poorly of each other and work so dysfunctionally could actually come together to build some of the most amazing machines on earth (because modern airliners truly are such things).
The best take I could come up with was "Maybe all the adversity and mistrust means the end up building things that survive intense scrutiny."
That level of sniping also means that groupthink can't happen, which is a major problem at Boeing: nobody wanted to speak up about obvious problems, and those that did saw their careers ended.
It’s fair to describe Boeing’s problems as being caused by Boeing now being actually McDonnell Douglas. It’s only called Boeing because MD had a terrible reputation.
If we talk about the same „innovation“ offshoot, it happened right after I left the company. I think the cultural change that the top leadership at that time wanted to push was just too much to not cause a backlash. A new CTO who was perceived as an outsider, a somewhat implied message that the Silicon Valley’s way of working was superior to the company‘s traditional approach, and the internal realization that Airbus started to lag behind leading to the typical defensive behaviors. Curious how the culture evolved since then
I left A^3 (or Acubed, groan) 5 years ago, to relocate overseas, so I don't know how it's been since. There was definitely a bit of a "Silicon Valley knows best" attitude that I didn't buy into (because the people I met at Airbus were pretty damn sharp ... while I felt very overpaid, but anyway).
There was always some talk of maneuvering around other groups who wanted our project or wanted to beat us to the punch or whatever, which felt a bit pointlessly unproductive to me, so I did my best to ignore it and try to just deliver.
I did get to meet some cool people, though, including Grazia Vittadini, so I can't complain.
While there is some amount of sniping and banter everywhere whenever Americans and French will have different ways of expressing " this is 90% great" or "this is only 10% usable"
Americans might praise a bad solution one moment (for politeness) and turn their back on you the other while French will say "this is ok" while they are deeply enjoying it
That started before airbus. People forget that Aerospatiale (a founder of airbus) was a partner in Concord (aka Concorde). That is where cross-boarder aerospace really got started. Many saw such partnerships as key to keeping Europe together politically. Without Concorde-Airbus, europe might have looked very different.
> I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project
Cf Arianespace.
Well they had a good run in 80s and 90s now they are massively behind competition and being kept alive by government payouts (to be fair much like France itself..)
France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
Also arianespace group has 60% of their revenue from the development of the m51 nuclear launcher, the rocket thing is their side show and a way to subsidize our nuclear launcher development not the other way around.
Also ag studied a reusable launcher in the early 2000s and found it not viable economically, because it wasn't, to make it work space x had to have massive government subsidies in guaranteed launch AND starlink which was essentially let our own investors and the dod feed the finance of space x until it's viable. Which is a good strategy mind you, but as a result pointing the finger at ag being supported by government funding as if it was a bad sign is rather absurd.
> France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
Yes, by borrowing. Any meaningful reforms seems infeasible due to social and political reasons.
> Also arianespace group has 60% of their revenue from the development of the m51 nuclear launcher
Yes, so we agree its hardly much more than a government military contractor making its money from legacy products and not some sort of an innovative company.
I wouldn't exactly call the world's fastest ballistic missile (Mach 25!) a legacy product...
It's just an orbital launch vehicle. Something the US can produce by dozens per day it needed. Whereas the French have a stockpile which is no more than 50 with a production rate of maybe 1 or 2 per month.
> France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
For the past 18 years at least, France has been trapped in an economic stagnation driven by terrible economic policies (as if trying to outcompete eastern Europe on cost wasn't a great idea). The only thing that keeps the economist from collapsing entirely is the perpetual stimulus from public spending using foreign loans. (This also will probably stop being sufficient soon since the governing party seems to be obsessed by the idea of reducing public spending instead of fixing their economic policy).
Well I would disagree with that and laugh at the fact that this exact analysis has been published by The Economist and similar for the past 50 years, in fact for the first time France unemployment numbers have gone below the numbers they climbed to in the 90s, and in 2020 for the first time since the turn of the century our deficit was reaching a point allowing our debt to start lowering instead of climbing, and was stopped by a combination of both covid and then the energy crisis and the cover offered to french people.
We do have issues and for the past 3 years they've been amplified by our political standoff (parliament cut in three third and none agree to work with the others), but the core of our economic woes is from pensions.
You forgot to mention that in 2020 currencies were devalued through severe QE, which means it is easier in 2025 to pay back 2M EUR than it was in 2020
Inflation != currency devaluation and France had a pretty tame inflation compared to many of its neighbors (significantly less than Belgium for instance), which again is a good illustration that inflation has nothing to do with the money supply or the value of a currency, no matter how prevalent this myth is.
> Inflation != currency devaluation
Neither which is the same as expanding the monetary base (debasement if you want to be spicy).
An economy with a shrinking money supply can experience inflation and devaluation relative to other currencies. An economy with a growing money supply can experience deflation and a strong currency.