Undervalued Engineers?
Joined: Feb 2003
Posts: 3,311
Likes: 365
From: uk
Regarding the thread title, I came across it in many forms. Two events that stand out in my memory:
1. A former RAF avionics/instrument technician (probably using the wrong term there) came to work for us at an RN 3rd line workshop after serving 9 years, doing a stint in Saudi, and then as an air university tutor. The civil service (or perhaps just the RN part of it) refused to recognise his RAF qualifications. He was told to go to college to get at least an ONC, when everyone knew he had far more than that. He enrolled, went back 9 months later to sit his exams, and got a Distinction. Ended up quite senior, and remains a good friend.
2. In April 1992, Air Member Supply and Organisation, in furtherance of their 'savings at the expense of safety' policy (see Nimrod Review) issued an edict that forthwith all engineers would be subordinate to any administrative grade. This was just as all MoD(PE)'s airworthiness specialists had been transferred to AMSO. A young lady 3 grades below me phoned to say she was now my line manager. My boss dealt with it best. He tasked Llangennech to deliver a complete set of APs for the RAF radars he managed (Phantom, Bucc...) to the equally young supplier who was now his boss, and told her to get on with it, she was running the Blue Parrot reliability upgrade programme. Meanwhile we all shipped out back to PE, with DGSM saying good riddance. I never really saw any improvement after that, with (in 1997) non-engineers allowed to self-delegate airworthiness approval. RIP those they killed.
1. A former RAF avionics/instrument technician (probably using the wrong term there) came to work for us at an RN 3rd line workshop after serving 9 years, doing a stint in Saudi, and then as an air university tutor. The civil service (or perhaps just the RN part of it) refused to recognise his RAF qualifications. He was told to go to college to get at least an ONC, when everyone knew he had far more than that. He enrolled, went back 9 months later to sit his exams, and got a Distinction. Ended up quite senior, and remains a good friend.
2. In April 1992, Air Member Supply and Organisation, in furtherance of their 'savings at the expense of safety' policy (see Nimrod Review) issued an edict that forthwith all engineers would be subordinate to any administrative grade. This was just as all MoD(PE)'s airworthiness specialists had been transferred to AMSO. A young lady 3 grades below me phoned to say she was now my line manager. My boss dealt with it best. He tasked Llangennech to deliver a complete set of APs for the RAF radars he managed (Phantom, Bucc...) to the equally young supplier who was now his boss, and told her to get on with it, she was running the Blue Parrot reliability upgrade programme. Meanwhile we all shipped out back to PE, with DGSM saying good riddance. I never really saw any improvement after that, with (in 1997) non-engineers allowed to self-delegate airworthiness approval. RIP those they killed.
Joined: Jan 2008
Aviation Qualifications: Military
Posts: 3,346
Likes: 2,119
From: Glorious Devon
After a meeting in a Cmd HQ, I had a lady CS tell me she was a Wg Cdr equivalent and therefore senior to me and a Sqn Ldr colleague, so therefore we should do as we were told. Our response was that we doubted she would make it through the selection process, let alone graduate from RAFC.
Joined: Feb 2003
Posts: 3,311
Likes: 365
From: uk
After a meeting in a Cmd HQ, I had a lady CS tell me she was a Wg Cdr equivalent and therefore senior to me and a Sqn Ldr colleague, so therefore we should do as we were told. Our response was that we doubted she would make it through the selection process, let alone graduate from RAFC.
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 1
Likes: 1
From: uk
Good to see that the FRI has been delivered, but for myself I have not chose to accept it, but instead pivot 180 and submit my ET. Career Management (CM) was the downfall, not Deployments, FGENs, Salary etc.
It was CM's inability to provide myself with any form of management, beyond checking a website for roles that may or may not be available.
It was CM's inability to provide myself with any form of management, beyond checking a website for roles that may or may not be available.
Last edited by Happy_Techie; 26th January 2025 at 12:46.
Joined: Mar 2024
Posts: 7
Likes: 1
From: Fife
Land Rover? Showing my heritage, admittedly late 90's. What's the standard sqn groundcrew runaround now; some kind of hybrid SUV I guess ......
My scenario was around an aircraft arriving for Scheduled Maintenance
Joined: Oct 2006
Posts: 290
Likes: 152
From: Too far South
As long as the charging infrastructure is there, electric vehicles are perfect for station based jobs - most of them do less than 30 miles a day and electricity can be much cheaper than diesel. Also many of the modern diesels on stations often suffered with blocked DPFs as they were not driven long, far or fast enough for regeneration to start which resulted in lots of check engine lights and breakdowns. This then led to vehicles being taken away from squadrons for servicing with no replacements being made available.
Joined: Jul 2022
Aviation Qualifications: LAME
Posts: 897
Likes: 533
From: Down Sarf
Aircraft manufacturers should be riding high thanks to a travel boom that has created unprecedented levels of demand.
Bookings have surged as millions head to the beach and the predicted demise of face-to-face business meetings fails to materialise. Airports including London Heathrow have recently announced record passenger numbers.
Yet Airbus and Boeing are struggling to build planes fast enough to keep up with demand. Both manufacturers are falling short of delivery targets as their supply chains buckle under the strain.
British Airways, Ryanair, Virgin Atlantic and Wizz have all been forced to rein in their planned schedules and watch profits ebb away. The manufacturers themselves have been deprived of vital revenue and reduced to firefighting one production issue after another.
Across much of the aviation industry, what should have been a boom is turning out to be little more than a whimper. Waiting times for the most popular jets are now into the next decade.
The situation can be traced back to multiple causes, including a near-disaster involving a 737 jet that led regulators to cap output at Boeing and engine issues at companies including Rolls-Royce.
But Airbus last week highlighted a more basic factor at the heart of the crunch: the industry is suffering from what amounts to a severe case of long Covid, following the exodus of tens of thousands of experienced personnel during the pandemic.
Three years after the last Covid-related curbs were lifted, manufacturers are still woefully short of veteran engineers and technicians, says Christian Scherer, head of commercial aircraft at Airbus.
“What the supply chain has suffered the most from is a loss of expertise,” he says.
“A lot of people, with years and years of accumulated expertise, that have taken early retirement or have redirected their professional activities elsewhere. That takes a lot of time to rebuild. That’s really the fundamental, deep problem.”
The supply chain crisis last year forced Airbus to revise an 800-plane delivery target to 770 after barely four months. In the event it handed over 766 aircraft, still almost 100 short of the number shipped in 2019.
Scherer insists Airbus will reach those pre-pandemic production volumes “in the foreseeable future,” while adding: “I’m not going to tell you when.”
Boeing, meanwhile, revealed last week that it had delivered just 348 jets in 2024, down 180 on the previous year’s tally and less than half its pre-pandemic peak.
The US giant was plunged into crisis after a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines 737 Max at 16,000 feet last January. Subsequent checks revealed safety and quality-control issues across the supply chain, leading regulators to cap Max output at 38 planes a month.
A Boeing insider later said that the depletion of the workforce during the pandemic meant it had to “turn baristas into engineers” – a reference to the location of the company’s main assembly lines in Seattle, home to Starbucks and a world centre for coffee roasting.
Potential recruits with a technical bent have meanwhile gravitated towards companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, which are also based in the area.
Nick Cunningham, an aviation analyst at Agency Partners, said manufacturers should have seen the staffing problem coming and done more to replace the “big hump of middle-aged workers” who were set to retire around the same time with or without the pandemic.
“It was a collective error on the part of the industry on both sides of the Atlantic. It had become very dependent on a group of grizzled veterans.They all looked like members of ZZ Top and called themselves ‘shop rats’ but they actually did all the work.
“The new generation of recruits is just not as productive. They’re a green workforce and with many of the trainers also retiring it’s going to take years to get them up to speed.
“It becomes much more expensive because you are making fewer things, so volumes drop even though you’re employing the same number of people.”
At Airbus, bottlenecks are affecting the supply of components ranging from aircraft engines, cabin equipment, galleys and seats to toilet doors and even the bolts and washers that hold together sections of fuselage.
Shortages of interior items have been exacerbated by airlines seeking to refurbish cabins in ageing planes that are being kept in service precisely because of the lack of new jets.
Guillaume Faury, the chief executive of Airbus, said last week that shortages of even a simple part at a single supplier could be enough to derail a whole aircraft.
He said: “Because we are going at the pace of the slowest of our suppliers, when you think you are there, you are blind-sided by something you were not expecting.
“The number and depth of the crises that we managed last year was very significant. I don’t expect a lot of change in the nature of the problems.”
Attracting new workers is not the only problem manufacturers face. Cunningham says keeping them is also a challenge, even with the lure of relatively attractive pay deals.
He says: “They want a nice desk job where they can be on the internet all day. They don’t want to work in what can be a cold, noisy and occasionally dangerous environment doing something that is repetitive and really not that pleasant.”
Mounting concern about the production crunch was evident in Dublin last week, where aircraft leasing companies that collectively own and manage around half the world’s fleet warned that plane shortages would persist for years.
An over-dependency on ‘grizzled veterans’, or ‘shop rats’, has been blamed for plane-makers’ staffing struggles Steven Udvar-Házy, the executive chairman of Air Lease, told the Airline Economics conference that neither Airbus nor Boeing were meeting “any of their production targets” and had made “big judgment errors” in seeking to increase deliveries before stabilising their operations.
Denis Hogan, a founder of SMBC Aviation Capital, said it would take “until the end of the decade” to fully resolve the supply-chain issues.
Bosses were similarly pessimistic about a parallel crisis surrounding the poor resilience of engines supplied by Pratt & Whitney (P&W) and Rolls-Royce. Issues with engines have forced jets to be recalled for emergency maintenance, further depriving airlines of essential capacity.
József Váradi, the Wizz Air boss, said he had expected groundings of the airline’s A320s for the replacement of worn engines to span no more than two years, but it now appears to be “a four to five-year issue”.
Airbus insists that it is making progress addressing these issues. Dozens of staff are working to alleviate bottlenecks at suppliers such as Spirit, which makes wings for its A220 jet and supplied the faulty door panel to Boeing.
The European company has also formed a task force to address fastener shortages and a team dedicated to helping airlines procure cabin interiors. In some cases, Airbus is providing financing to companies that would otherwise be unable to provide parts at the required pace.
Despite the continued issues, plane-makers plan to boost build rates to reduce order backlogs. Faury said Airbus had no intention of backing away from plans to lift A320 production to 75 planes a month in 2027. That’s 50pc higher than average monthly deliveries last year.
The company is already able to produce aircraft on eight global assembly lines, with two more to be added by next year. Crucially, however, it needs the supply chain to keep in step.
The chief executive said: “It’s not nice to have customers complaining that you’re delivering late. But if we are too shy we waste opportunities to deliver planes. We need to find the sweet spot.”
Bookings have surged as millions head to the beach and the predicted demise of face-to-face business meetings fails to materialise. Airports including London Heathrow have recently announced record passenger numbers.
Yet Airbus and Boeing are struggling to build planes fast enough to keep up with demand. Both manufacturers are falling short of delivery targets as their supply chains buckle under the strain.
British Airways, Ryanair, Virgin Atlantic and Wizz have all been forced to rein in their planned schedules and watch profits ebb away. The manufacturers themselves have been deprived of vital revenue and reduced to firefighting one production issue after another.
Across much of the aviation industry, what should have been a boom is turning out to be little more than a whimper. Waiting times for the most popular jets are now into the next decade.
The situation can be traced back to multiple causes, including a near-disaster involving a 737 jet that led regulators to cap output at Boeing and engine issues at companies including Rolls-Royce.
But Airbus last week highlighted a more basic factor at the heart of the crunch: the industry is suffering from what amounts to a severe case of long Covid, following the exodus of tens of thousands of experienced personnel during the pandemic.
Three years after the last Covid-related curbs were lifted, manufacturers are still woefully short of veteran engineers and technicians, says Christian Scherer, head of commercial aircraft at Airbus.
“What the supply chain has suffered the most from is a loss of expertise,” he says.
“A lot of people, with years and years of accumulated expertise, that have taken early retirement or have redirected their professional activities elsewhere. That takes a lot of time to rebuild. That’s really the fundamental, deep problem.”
The supply chain crisis last year forced Airbus to revise an 800-plane delivery target to 770 after barely four months. In the event it handed over 766 aircraft, still almost 100 short of the number shipped in 2019.
Scherer insists Airbus will reach those pre-pandemic production volumes “in the foreseeable future,” while adding: “I’m not going to tell you when.”
Boeing, meanwhile, revealed last week that it had delivered just 348 jets in 2024, down 180 on the previous year’s tally and less than half its pre-pandemic peak.
The US giant was plunged into crisis after a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines 737 Max at 16,000 feet last January. Subsequent checks revealed safety and quality-control issues across the supply chain, leading regulators to cap Max output at 38 planes a month.
A Boeing insider later said that the depletion of the workforce during the pandemic meant it had to “turn baristas into engineers” – a reference to the location of the company’s main assembly lines in Seattle, home to Starbucks and a world centre for coffee roasting.
Potential recruits with a technical bent have meanwhile gravitated towards companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, which are also based in the area.
Nick Cunningham, an aviation analyst at Agency Partners, said manufacturers should have seen the staffing problem coming and done more to replace the “big hump of middle-aged workers” who were set to retire around the same time with or without the pandemic.
“It was a collective error on the part of the industry on both sides of the Atlantic. It had become very dependent on a group of grizzled veterans.They all looked like members of ZZ Top and called themselves ‘shop rats’ but they actually did all the work.
“The new generation of recruits is just not as productive. They’re a green workforce and with many of the trainers also retiring it’s going to take years to get them up to speed.
“It becomes much more expensive because you are making fewer things, so volumes drop even though you’re employing the same number of people.”
At Airbus, bottlenecks are affecting the supply of components ranging from aircraft engines, cabin equipment, galleys and seats to toilet doors and even the bolts and washers that hold together sections of fuselage.
Shortages of interior items have been exacerbated by airlines seeking to refurbish cabins in ageing planes that are being kept in service precisely because of the lack of new jets.
Guillaume Faury, the chief executive of Airbus, said last week that shortages of even a simple part at a single supplier could be enough to derail a whole aircraft.
He said: “Because we are going at the pace of the slowest of our suppliers, when you think you are there, you are blind-sided by something you were not expecting.
“The number and depth of the crises that we managed last year was very significant. I don’t expect a lot of change in the nature of the problems.”
Attracting new workers is not the only problem manufacturers face. Cunningham says keeping them is also a challenge, even with the lure of relatively attractive pay deals.
He says: “They want a nice desk job where they can be on the internet all day. They don’t want to work in what can be a cold, noisy and occasionally dangerous environment doing something that is repetitive and really not that pleasant.”
Mounting concern about the production crunch was evident in Dublin last week, where aircraft leasing companies that collectively own and manage around half the world’s fleet warned that plane shortages would persist for years.
An over-dependency on ‘grizzled veterans’, or ‘shop rats’, has been blamed for plane-makers’ staffing struggles Steven Udvar-Házy, the executive chairman of Air Lease, told the Airline Economics conference that neither Airbus nor Boeing were meeting “any of their production targets” and had made “big judgment errors” in seeking to increase deliveries before stabilising their operations.
Denis Hogan, a founder of SMBC Aviation Capital, said it would take “until the end of the decade” to fully resolve the supply-chain issues.
Bosses were similarly pessimistic about a parallel crisis surrounding the poor resilience of engines supplied by Pratt & Whitney (P&W) and Rolls-Royce. Issues with engines have forced jets to be recalled for emergency maintenance, further depriving airlines of essential capacity.
József Váradi, the Wizz Air boss, said he had expected groundings of the airline’s A320s for the replacement of worn engines to span no more than two years, but it now appears to be “a four to five-year issue”.
Airbus insists that it is making progress addressing these issues. Dozens of staff are working to alleviate bottlenecks at suppliers such as Spirit, which makes wings for its A220 jet and supplied the faulty door panel to Boeing.
The European company has also formed a task force to address fastener shortages and a team dedicated to helping airlines procure cabin interiors. In some cases, Airbus is providing financing to companies that would otherwise be unable to provide parts at the required pace.
Despite the continued issues, plane-makers plan to boost build rates to reduce order backlogs. Faury said Airbus had no intention of backing away from plans to lift A320 production to 75 planes a month in 2027. That’s 50pc higher than average monthly deliveries last year.
The company is already able to produce aircraft on eight global assembly lines, with two more to be added by next year. Crucially, however, it needs the supply chain to keep in step.
The chief executive said: “It’s not nice to have customers complaining that you’re delivering late. But if we are too shy we waste opportunities to deliver planes. We need to find the sweet spot.”
Joined: Jul 2022
Aviation Qualifications: LAME
Posts: 897
Likes: 533
From: Down Sarf
Because piston aeroplanes don't interest any top wack B1s. 10 years of turboprops was enough. You will not pay enough I wager. Saying that I heard your rate at Lorraine land was high for a sup. Nah. I bet your rate is not as good as mine.
Joined: Jul 2022
Aviation Qualifications: LAME
Posts: 897
Likes: 533
From: Down Sarf
Yeah, it's pretty much all white fleet now. EVs starting to enter the fleet too. The Stn Cdr has one at Lossie and there's a decent charging infrastructure on base.
Ok. I've not had any experience of pre-maintenance runs, presumably as it's large a/c only, but the majority of ML2 and almost all ML3 maintenance is contracted out now anyway.
Ok. I've not had any experience of pre-maintenance runs, presumably as it's large a/c only, but the majority of ML2 and almost all ML3 maintenance is contracted out now anyway.
Joined: Feb 2006
Aviation Qualifications: LAME
Posts: 36,143
Likes: 5,738
From: Falling off the end of the thread
The lack of skilled and trained military engineers that can maintain and repair the fleets are screwed too. Hangars also use to be built with doors to withstand a blast wave, these days a puff of wind and the roof is off.
Imagine it, the attack has stalled due to the lack of charging points and the time to recharge..
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 1,030
Likes: 262
From: Blighty
Apologies for thread drift.
Back on topic, the new year round of pay negotiations is under way, 12% over three years plus bonus seems to be the going rate.
Joined: Dec 2012
Aviation Qualifications: LAME
Posts: 1,159
Likes: 841
From: Co. Down
the new year round of pay negotiations is under way, 12% over three years plus bonus seems to be the going rate.
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 1,030
Likes: 262
From: Blighty
To be fair to Labour it was worse under Conservative. It's only in the last couple of years that pay rises in the sector have started to catch up with supply and demand, the lag has caused the situation we are in now. Too many have left, not enough trained up and many of those that did have found the pay is better elsewhere.
Edit to add having just done my tax return (and getting a Ł300 rebate 👍
I noticed that my total pay has increased by nearly 50% in the last two years!
Edit to add having just done my tax return (and getting a Ł300 rebate 👍
I noticed that my total pay has increased by nearly 50% in the last two years!
Last edited by HOVIS; 31st January 2025 at 13:48.
Joined: Jul 2022
Aviation Qualifications: LAME
Posts: 897
Likes: 533
From: Down Sarf
To be fair to Labour it was worse under Conservative. It's only in the last couple of years that pay rises in the sector have started to catch up with supply and demand, the lag has caused the situation we are in now. Too many have left, not enough trained up and many of those that did have found the pay is better elsewhere.
Edit to add having just done my tax return (and getting a Ł300 rebate 👍 I noticed that my total pay has increased by nearly 50% in the last two years!
Edit to add having just done my tax return (and getting a Ł300 rebate 👍
I noticed that my total pay has increased by nearly 50% in the last two years!
Alas the RAF is not somewhere I would advise someone to start in Aviation engineering.Joined: Dec 2012
Aviation Qualifications: LAME
Posts: 1,159
Likes: 841
From: Co. Down
Well done Hovis, if only the engineers' worth had been recognised a few decades back the industry (and automotive industry) wouldn't be in the position it is now. Just for interest, do any of the senior engineers posting here have apprentices or trainees alongside them for training?
Joined: Oct 2013
Posts: 804
Likes: 96
From: UK
Aircraft manufacturers should be riding high thanks to a travel boom that has created unprecedented levels of demand.
Bookings have surged as millions head to the beach and the predicted demise of face-to-face business meetings fails to materialise. Airports including London Heathrow have recently announced record passenger numbers.
Yet Airbus and Boeing are struggling to build planes fast enough to keep up with demand. Both manufacturers are falling short of delivery targets as their supply chains buckle under the strain.
British Airways, Ryanair, Virgin Atlantic and Wizz have all been forced to rein in their planned schedules and watch profits ebb away. The manufacturers themselves have been deprived of vital revenue and reduced to firefighting one production issue after another.
Across much of the aviation industry, what should have been a boom is turning out to be little more than a whimper. Waiting times for the most popular jets are now into the next decade.
The situation can be traced back to multiple causes, including a near-disaster involving a 737 jet that led regulators to cap output at Boeing and engine issues at companies including Rolls-Royce.
But Airbus last week highlighted a more basic factor at the heart of the crunch: the industry is suffering from what amounts to a severe case of long Covid, following the exodus of tens of thousands of experienced personnel during the pandemic.
Three years after the last Covid-related curbs were lifted, manufacturers are still woefully short of veteran engineers and technicians, says Christian Scherer, head of commercial aircraft at Airbus.
“What the supply chain has suffered the most from is a loss of expertise,” he says.
“A lot of people, with years and years of accumulated expertise, that have taken early retirement or have redirected their professional activities elsewhere. That takes a lot of time to rebuild. That’s really the fundamental, deep problem.”
The supply chain crisis last year forced Airbus to revise an 800-plane delivery target to 770 after barely four months. In the event it handed over 766 aircraft, still almost 100 short of the number shipped in 2019.
Scherer insists Airbus will reach those pre-pandemic production volumes “in the foreseeable future,” while adding: “I’m not going to tell you when.”
Boeing, meanwhile, revealed last week that it had delivered just 348 jets in 2024, down 180 on the previous year’s tally and less than half its pre-pandemic peak.
The US giant was plunged into crisis after a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines 737 Max at 16,000 feet last January. Subsequent checks revealed safety and quality-control issues across the supply chain, leading regulators to cap Max output at 38 planes a month.
A Boeing insider later said that the depletion of the workforce during the pandemic meant it had to “turn baristas into engineers” – a reference to the location of the company’s main assembly lines in Seattle, home to Starbucks and a world centre for coffee roasting.
Potential recruits with a technical bent have meanwhile gravitated towards companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, which are also based in the area.
Nick Cunningham, an aviation analyst at Agency Partners, said manufacturers should have seen the staffing problem coming and done more to replace the “big hump of middle-aged workers” who were set to retire around the same time with or without the pandemic.
“It was a collective error on the part of the industry on both sides of the Atlantic. It had become very dependent on a group of grizzled veterans.They all looked like members of ZZ Top and called themselves ‘shop rats’ but they actually did all the work.
“The new generation of recruits is just not as productive. They’re a green workforce and with many of the trainers also retiring it’s going to take years to get them up to speed.
“It becomes much more expensive because you are making fewer things, so volumes drop even though you’re employing the same number of people.”
At Airbus, bottlenecks are affecting the supply of components ranging from aircraft engines, cabin equipment, galleys and seats to toilet doors and even the bolts and washers that hold together sections of fuselage.
Shortages of interior items have been exacerbated by airlines seeking to refurbish cabins in ageing planes that are being kept in service precisely because of the lack of new jets.
Guillaume Faury, the chief executive of Airbus, said last week that shortages of even a simple part at a single supplier could be enough to derail a whole aircraft.
He said: “Because we are going at the pace of the slowest of our suppliers, when you think you are there, you are blind-sided by something you were not expecting.
“The number and depth of the crises that we managed last year was very significant. I don’t expect a lot of change in the nature of the problems.”
Attracting new workers is not the only problem manufacturers face. Cunningham says keeping them is also a challenge, even with the lure of relatively attractive pay deals.
He says: “They want a nice desk job where they can be on the internet all day. They don’t want to work in what can be a cold, noisy and occasionally dangerous environment doing something that is repetitive and really not that pleasant.”
Mounting concern about the production crunch was evident in Dublin last week, where aircraft leasing companies that collectively own and manage around half the world’s fleet warned that plane shortages would persist for years.
An over-dependency on ‘grizzled veterans’, or ‘shop rats’, has been blamed for plane-makers’ staffing struggles Steven Udvar-Házy, the executive chairman of Air Lease, told the Airline Economics conference that neither Airbus nor Boeing were meeting “any of their production targets” and had made “big judgment errors” in seeking to increase deliveries before stabilising their operations.
Denis Hogan, a founder of SMBC Aviation Capital, said it would take “until the end of the decade” to fully resolve the supply-chain issues.
Bosses were similarly pessimistic about a parallel crisis surrounding the poor resilience of engines supplied by Pratt & Whitney (P&W) and Rolls-Royce. Issues with engines have forced jets to be recalled for emergency maintenance, further depriving airlines of essential capacity.
József Váradi, the Wizz Air boss, said he had expected groundings of the airline’s A320s for the replacement of worn engines to span no more than two years, but it now appears to be “a four to five-year issue”.
Airbus insists that it is making progress addressing these issues. Dozens of staff are working to alleviate bottlenecks at suppliers such as Spirit, which makes wings for its A220 jet and supplied the faulty door panel to Boeing.
The European company has also formed a task force to address fastener shortages and a team dedicated to helping airlines procure cabin interiors. In some cases, Airbus is providing financing to companies that would otherwise be unable to provide parts at the required pace.
Despite the continued issues, plane-makers plan to boost build rates to reduce order backlogs. Faury said Airbus had no intention of backing away from plans to lift A320 production to 75 planes a month in 2027. That’s 50pc higher than average monthly deliveries last year.
The company is already able to produce aircraft on eight global assembly lines, with two more to be added by next year. Crucially, however, it needs the supply chain to keep in step.
The chief executive said: “It’s not nice to have customers complaining that you’re delivering late. But if we are too shy we waste opportunities to deliver planes. We need to find the sweet spot.”
Bookings have surged as millions head to the beach and the predicted demise of face-to-face business meetings fails to materialise. Airports including London Heathrow have recently announced record passenger numbers.
Yet Airbus and Boeing are struggling to build planes fast enough to keep up with demand. Both manufacturers are falling short of delivery targets as their supply chains buckle under the strain.
British Airways, Ryanair, Virgin Atlantic and Wizz have all been forced to rein in their planned schedules and watch profits ebb away. The manufacturers themselves have been deprived of vital revenue and reduced to firefighting one production issue after another.
Across much of the aviation industry, what should have been a boom is turning out to be little more than a whimper. Waiting times for the most popular jets are now into the next decade.
The situation can be traced back to multiple causes, including a near-disaster involving a 737 jet that led regulators to cap output at Boeing and engine issues at companies including Rolls-Royce.
But Airbus last week highlighted a more basic factor at the heart of the crunch: the industry is suffering from what amounts to a severe case of long Covid, following the exodus of tens of thousands of experienced personnel during the pandemic.
Three years after the last Covid-related curbs were lifted, manufacturers are still woefully short of veteran engineers and technicians, says Christian Scherer, head of commercial aircraft at Airbus.
“What the supply chain has suffered the most from is a loss of expertise,” he says.
“A lot of people, with years and years of accumulated expertise, that have taken early retirement or have redirected their professional activities elsewhere. That takes a lot of time to rebuild. That’s really the fundamental, deep problem.”
The supply chain crisis last year forced Airbus to revise an 800-plane delivery target to 770 after barely four months. In the event it handed over 766 aircraft, still almost 100 short of the number shipped in 2019.
Scherer insists Airbus will reach those pre-pandemic production volumes “in the foreseeable future,” while adding: “I’m not going to tell you when.”
Boeing, meanwhile, revealed last week that it had delivered just 348 jets in 2024, down 180 on the previous year’s tally and less than half its pre-pandemic peak.
The US giant was plunged into crisis after a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines 737 Max at 16,000 feet last January. Subsequent checks revealed safety and quality-control issues across the supply chain, leading regulators to cap Max output at 38 planes a month.
A Boeing insider later said that the depletion of the workforce during the pandemic meant it had to “turn baristas into engineers” – a reference to the location of the company’s main assembly lines in Seattle, home to Starbucks and a world centre for coffee roasting.
Potential recruits with a technical bent have meanwhile gravitated towards companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, which are also based in the area.
Nick Cunningham, an aviation analyst at Agency Partners, said manufacturers should have seen the staffing problem coming and done more to replace the “big hump of middle-aged workers” who were set to retire around the same time with or without the pandemic.
“It was a collective error on the part of the industry on both sides of the Atlantic. It had become very dependent on a group of grizzled veterans.They all looked like members of ZZ Top and called themselves ‘shop rats’ but they actually did all the work.
“The new generation of recruits is just not as productive. They’re a green workforce and with many of the trainers also retiring it’s going to take years to get them up to speed.
“It becomes much more expensive because you are making fewer things, so volumes drop even though you’re employing the same number of people.”
At Airbus, bottlenecks are affecting the supply of components ranging from aircraft engines, cabin equipment, galleys and seats to toilet doors and even the bolts and washers that hold together sections of fuselage.
Shortages of interior items have been exacerbated by airlines seeking to refurbish cabins in ageing planes that are being kept in service precisely because of the lack of new jets.
Guillaume Faury, the chief executive of Airbus, said last week that shortages of even a simple part at a single supplier could be enough to derail a whole aircraft.
He said: “Because we are going at the pace of the slowest of our suppliers, when you think you are there, you are blind-sided by something you were not expecting.
“The number and depth of the crises that we managed last year was very significant. I don’t expect a lot of change in the nature of the problems.”
Attracting new workers is not the only problem manufacturers face. Cunningham says keeping them is also a challenge, even with the lure of relatively attractive pay deals.
He says: “They want a nice desk job where they can be on the internet all day. They don’t want to work in what can be a cold, noisy and occasionally dangerous environment doing something that is repetitive and really not that pleasant.”
Mounting concern about the production crunch was evident in Dublin last week, where aircraft leasing companies that collectively own and manage around half the world’s fleet warned that plane shortages would persist for years.
An over-dependency on ‘grizzled veterans’, or ‘shop rats’, has been blamed for plane-makers’ staffing struggles Steven Udvar-Házy, the executive chairman of Air Lease, told the Airline Economics conference that neither Airbus nor Boeing were meeting “any of their production targets” and had made “big judgment errors” in seeking to increase deliveries before stabilising their operations.
Denis Hogan, a founder of SMBC Aviation Capital, said it would take “until the end of the decade” to fully resolve the supply-chain issues.
Bosses were similarly pessimistic about a parallel crisis surrounding the poor resilience of engines supplied by Pratt & Whitney (P&W) and Rolls-Royce. Issues with engines have forced jets to be recalled for emergency maintenance, further depriving airlines of essential capacity.
József Váradi, the Wizz Air boss, said he had expected groundings of the airline’s A320s for the replacement of worn engines to span no more than two years, but it now appears to be “a four to five-year issue”.
Airbus insists that it is making progress addressing these issues. Dozens of staff are working to alleviate bottlenecks at suppliers such as Spirit, which makes wings for its A220 jet and supplied the faulty door panel to Boeing.
The European company has also formed a task force to address fastener shortages and a team dedicated to helping airlines procure cabin interiors. In some cases, Airbus is providing financing to companies that would otherwise be unable to provide parts at the required pace.
Despite the continued issues, plane-makers plan to boost build rates to reduce order backlogs. Faury said Airbus had no intention of backing away from plans to lift A320 production to 75 planes a month in 2027. That’s 50pc higher than average monthly deliveries last year.
The company is already able to produce aircraft on eight global assembly lines, with two more to be added by next year. Crucially, however, it needs the supply chain to keep in step.
The chief executive said: “It’s not nice to have customers complaining that you’re delivering late. But if we are too shy we waste opportunities to deliver planes. We need to find the sweet spot.”
I started my career and helped design 3 major aircraft projects. The place was full of people. But most of those people were contractors because it was cheaper for them with fewer overheads. The first people to go are the contractors and they are the ones with the real technical depth generally speaking.
Every year there is a requirement to put more and more work offshore in 'low cost' centres - India. This means less work is done in the UK by people with the appropriate experience.
This was by design.
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 1,030
Likes: 262
From: Blighty
Well done Hovis, if only the engineers' worth had been recognised a few decades back the industry (and automotive industry) wouldn't be in the position it is now. Just for interest, do any of the senior engineers posting here have apprentices or trainees alongside them for training?