flyblue
11th Dec 2006, 21:27
Article très intéréssant du Herald Tribune sur les raisons du désastre chez Airbus:
TOULOUSE, France: On Jan. 18, 2005, top executives of Airbus and its parent company, European Aeronautic Defense & Space, staged the aviation industry's equivalent of a Broadway musical for the A380s coming-out party here, complete with strobe lights, smoke machines and chorus girls. Before a rapt audience, Jacques Chirac, the French president, extolled the colossal, twin-deck jet as an unparalleled symbol of European manufacturing prowess.
"When it takes to the skies," Chirac said, "it will carry the colors of our Continent, and our technological ambitions, to even greater heights."
But as the dignitaries gathered at the Toulouse-Blagnac Airport to toast the world's largest commercial airplane, a multibillion-dollar industrial crisis was already unfolding inside the plane's windowless, 125,000 square-meter, or 1.35 million square-foot, assembly hall.
Beginning in the summer of 2004 — about six months earlier — large sections of the plane's forward and rear fuselage had been arriving unfinished from Airbus's other main A380 production site in Hamburg. By the 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...
la_suite... (http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/11/business/airbus.php?page=1)
TOULOUSE, France: On Jan. 18, 2005, top executives of Airbus and its parent company, European Aeronautic Defense & Space, staged the aviation industry's equivalent of a Broadway musical for the A380s coming-out party here, complete with strobe lights, smoke machines and chorus girls. Before a rapt audience, Jacques Chirac, the French president, extolled the colossal, twin-deck jet as an unparalleled symbol of European manufacturing prowess.
"When it takes to the skies," Chirac said, "it will carry the colors of our Continent, and our technological ambitions, to even greater heights."
But as the dignitaries gathered at the Toulouse-Blagnac Airport to toast the world's largest commercial airplane, a multibillion-dollar industrial crisis was already unfolding inside the plane's windowless, 125,000 square-meter, or 1.35 million square-foot, assembly hall.
Beginning in the summer of 2004 — about six months earlier — large sections of the plane's forward and rear fuselage had been arriving unfinished from Airbus's other main A380 production site in Hamburg. By the 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...
la_suite... (http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/11/business/airbus.php?page=1)