Fortune Disappoints:Fails to Tell Story Promised

This week's issue of Fortune magazine has a feature story on the A380 disaster. Several times, the magazine promises to tell the whole story of what went wrong -- in a special foldout page that features a partial xray representation of the enormous airplane.

I read it all, and still didn't learn what went wrong, other than a brief mention of wiring being too short, and Germany using 2D software. No mention of:

- the change from copper to aluminum wiring.

- the need to input the CATIA V4 data by hand into the French software system.

- the failure of IBM to integrate the data from the French and German CAD operations.

I did have to chuckle at the posturing by the French and German leaders just before the details of the 10,000-worker job cuts. The head of Germany said, "Let the company decide on the cuts; government should not interfere." The head of France said, "The cuts must be fair [ie, most of them should happen in Germany]."

Then the company decided: Almost half the cuts will be to the operations in France, but only a quarter in Germany (plus others in other countries).

Even so, the cuts are drawn out: over four years, and hopefully will be done on voluntary basis by workers. "If not enough workers leave on their own after 1.5-2 years," said one of the heads of the Airbus company, "Then we might have to be more forceful." So the German workers promptly go on strike. I guess that's one form of voluntary job cutting!

Comments

[Franco Folini]

Ralph, one interesting article on how the PLM takes the merit of Boeing success and, at the same time, the blame for Airbus failure was recently published on BaseLine magazine at this URL.
I'm not sure it has all the details you will like to know, but it's a very interesting article.

The Baseline article makes for interesting reading indeed, but is woefully inaccurate and/or misinformed regarding the simulation aspects (see page 2).

The fact that "a wing snapped during a stress test" is not all that remarkable, given that the test was intended to take the wind to ultimate load (i.e. failure).

And so on.