DOES SHODDY WORK IMPROVE IF YOU GO FASTER?:

Airbus superjumbo mess not just tangled in wires (David Greising, 12/26/06, Chicago Tribune)

In the dawning effort to set things right at Airbus' sprawling production plant here, one of modern industry's biggest meltdowns, is a tale of two airplane-production hangars and two countries, Germany and France.

Nearly 600 people should be hard at work in the key production hangar here, where Airbus planned to assemble the giant sections of the world's largest passenger airplane, the A380.

Instead, the quiet is broken only by music playing softly on stereo speakers a worker sneaked in. Only a few dozen employees tinker on eight airplane carcasses clogging a production line that cost some $15 billion to develop.

The workers essentially are hand-building some of the company's first two-dozen A380s.

Airbus' superjumbo jet program was launched before Boeing's big hit, the 787 Dreamliner, but the A380 now is two years behind schedule. The production delay will cost Airbus' parent company, European Aeronautic Defence & Space (EADS), $6.1 billion i[n] operating profit over the next four years.

In Hangar 42 nearby, it is a different scene. Dozens of aerospace engineers are in a mad dash to untangle the A380's myriad problems. They huddle in front of computer terminals, set up on 15-foot-long folding tables, so that they can be in constant contact with workers in blue jumpsuits investigating a hobbled A380.

The workers, confronted with bundles of wire that won't bend in the right places and cables that come up short, explain the problems to the engineers and urge them to design new ones. And quickly.

The craft in Hangar 51 will be in service here sooner.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 26, 2006 9:33 AM