Tag Archives: EADS

May 29, 2011 · 12:20 pm

Muret Air show 2011

The Red Arrows are the UK Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team. They are one of the most famous acrobatics teams worldwide. They were formed in the ‘60s when several unofficial teams were united under the new official team of the RAF.

The Red Arrows were performing yesterday at Muret Air exhibition, just 12km away from Toulouse so I went there to spend the day with some colleagues from Airbus (which kindly sponsored the show providing fuel for the aircraft). The organization of the event left the Red Arrows for the end of the day. The team is composed of 9 pilots plus an extra one who acts as road manager and commentator during the show (animator I should say). They fly BAE Hawk airplanes and are about 33 years old on average.

The several figures in different formation patterns that they performed were impressive (Diamond, Apollo, Vixen, Heart, Palm tree, etc.). I must admit that this was the first exhibition I attended, as the only other time when I witnessed acrobatics was at the Red Bull Race in Budapest in the summer of 2007, when I was on holidays there with friends.

I took several pictures and videos of their performance, but somehow I didn’t manage to save most of the videos correctly, so I can only show below the pictures in the slide show below:

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There were another two teams performing: the French Air Force Cartouche Doré (flying 3 TB30 Epsilon, made by Socata, a filial of EADS) and the Breitling Jet Team. The latter is a civilian acrobatic team (the only one) based in France. They fly L-39 Albatros.

Apart from these teams, there were several other planes that were flying in the show: L-39 Albatros, Cap 232, ATR-42, Beech King Air 200, some Pipers (simulating a fight between a police airplane and another one), P40… but the only ones my smartphone saved correctly in videos were the flights of the A380 and the A400M (no kidding, I did over 20 videos and discovered only these 2 were stored in the memory), enjoy them:

It was a good experience, perfect for a sunny Saturday. I wanted to remark the importance of having a good commentator and music to enhance the show. In Muret the commentator was great (apparently he is famous in France and engaged in all air shows) but the music was not always the best, though when it was it really made you (seriously) think “I want to fly one of those”…

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February 26, 2011 · 2:00 am

Wrong forecasts

Close to midnight of past Thursday we learnt that the winner of the KC-X competition to provide the aerial refuelling aircraft to the US Air Force was Boeing. That was cold news for our company.

I had just tweeted the previous day my bet on the competition:

I never get it right...

To reach to that conclusion I had done some numbers for fun on a late Friday afternoon some months ago in a similar fashion than the defence analyst Scott Hamilton showed in his blog. It is clear that I got it completely wrong.

As I have often told to my friends and colleagues, I am extremely bad with these predictions, as I was already mistaken when the JCA and the previous KC-X competitions were decided…

A note of humour: as my brother points out in fact I am very reliable, you just have to bet to the opposite option of my forecast.

Another colleague told us yesterday “you look like economists explaining your miscalculations…”, as someone put it “it is already hard to explain the past, it is even more difficult to predict the future”.

Already looking forward to the next win.

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February 13, 2011 · 11:00 am

Model of an airport

When I was in primary school I used to have a friend who had an impressive train model layout at home. Soon after, my parents gave me some very nice models that I still keep, though I do not play with them anymore and never continued to grow the layout nor purchased more train models.

Since I joined EADS I began collecting a few static models of aircraft: first an A380, then a Beluga, an A340-600, 2 A400M… Each time I stop at Schiphol airport with enough spare time I pay a visit to the model shop over there, so do I to Airbus online shop…

"Static" aircraft model collection at home... as of today.

However, few days ago, I found via Twitter a post in a blog that contained the following video of a model of an airport in Miniatur-Wonderland, Hamburg:

… if I take on this hobby it could be the beginning of my own end! What it’s sure is that whenever I go to Hamburg I’ll pay a visit to the place.

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February 3, 2011 · 8:00 am

Impact of Airbus in Toulouse employment

Some days ago, I attended for the first time a meeting of Rosemasters club in Toulouse. We were about 20 people attending. During the introduction round we discovered that there were 5 Airbus employees among us, which was 25% of us (plus 2 former employees). This could be expected given the importance of Airbus in the city of Toulouse… but, how important is it really?

I had read in some studies about the impact of air transport and aerospace industries in the economy of a given region; taking into account direct employment, indirect and induced. You may take a look at the report “The National Economic Impact of Civil Aviation” [PDF, 1.5MB] prepared by DRI•WEFA, to see some multipliers (Table 1 in page 8).

In the study, we can see that in the case of the USA, for every aerospace job there are 1.9 indirect jobs created and 1.5 induced jobs; thus one aerospace job creates 3.4 jobs.

If we use the same figures for the case of Toulouse:

  • Airbus and  EADS employ over 21,000 people here;
  • there would be another 41,000 indirect (employment generated in the businesses that supply goods and services to the aerospace sector) and
  • 32,000 induced jobs (employment in other sectors generated thanks to the income spent by direct and indirect aerospace-related employees) thanks to the activity of EADS in the region, in total ~73,000 extra jobs.

These together with the 21,000 jobs from EADS make up for a total of ~94,000 jobs.

Toulouse is a city of ~440,000 inhabitants, with 1.1 million living in the metropolitan area: ~9% of the population of the metropolitan area has a job created directly or indirectly thanks to EADS activity… if we talk about families, between 25-30% of the families depend on a job created directly or indirectly thanks to EADS activity.

No doubt, aerospace is a strategic sector for the region.

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February 1, 2011 · 8:00 am

Women in aerospace

I recently read an article titled “Why don’t women run airlines?” I found the question interesting, because I have had some conversations about the number of women and especially in management positions within my company.

Surely there are a lot of issues and reasons behind (e.g. what is called “the glass ceiling”) that have been well-studied. When encountered with this question, I asked my senior peers within the department how many women were in their class at the university when studying aerospace engineering: the answer was one or none. That is the proportion of women that one could expect should be in the top management of the company now.

Luckily the trend now is changing, but still, in general, the aerospace sector is lacking women. I compiled some statistics:

  • Only 4% of flagship airlines had a woman as CEO (according to the study in the above-mentioned article).
  • 19,627 women worked for EADS (16.5%) at the end of 2009 (17% in the case of Spain; 13.6% in the case of Airbus).
  • 31.9% women out of the 39,469 students of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in the year 2004 (I found this information using the Wayback Machine as the university does not publish this anymore in its website).
    • The admissions of that year kept the same proportion, 32% women.
  • 25.8% women out of the 1,983 students of my engineering school that same year (Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Aeronáuticos, now EIAE).
    • The admissions of that year had a higher proportion, 31.7% women (something is changing).
  • 41 women out of 191 (21.5%) students graduated with me in November 2005.
    • The promotion of 2005, ideally should have started in September 2000. That year, there were admitted 117 women out of 368 students, or 31.8% (the year I started, 1999, the proportion was 25.2% women… though not published, I guess the share was lower in previous years).
    • The fact that women were 21.5% of graduates while being 25.8% of the population of the school may point at some of the other reasons, which I am not qualified to discuss.

Even if there was no discrimination, I believe it will take some years before 32% of EADS workforce and top management are women (~25 years? when the proportion of the students now in the university reaches all stages of the age pyramid of the company). I guess the same will apply for airlines.

I’m afraid it may never happen that 50% of the workforce in the company are women, probably not until 25 years later than we see such a proportion in the aerospace engineering schools… which 5 years ago was still 32%.

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August 25, 2010 · 10:00 am

Skunk Works

It is known by nearly everyone in aviation industry the Lockheed Martin department: Skunk Works. It has its own website and it is were many planes have originated since World War II. We all have heard about the strict security rules and stories about how suddenly new aircraft were unveiled. Other companies have tried to establish similar departments; Boeing with its “Phantom Works” and EADS with its “Innovation Works”.

However, it was not until during my last holidays that I came to know the origin of the word, reading the book “Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus“, by Tim Hindle.

The name skunkworks originates from a cartoon series called “Li’l Abner” by Al Capp. The story is explained as well in the Wikipedia:

“[…] The “Skonk Works” was a dilapidated factory located on the remote outskirts of Dogpatch, in the backwoods of Kentucky. According to the strip, scores of locals were done in yearly by the toxic fumes of the concentrated “skonk oil”, which was brewed and barreled daily by “Big Barnsmell” (known as the lonely “inside man” at the Skonk Works), by grinding dead skunks and worn shoes into a smoldering still, for some mysterious, never specified purpose. […]”

Sometimes industry names come from the least expected place.

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June 21, 2010 · 8:00 am

Largest defence companies

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is, in their own words, an independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament. Every year they publish their famous SIPRI Yearbook with data about international conflicts, defence spending, defence companies…

In a previous post I showed cartograms of countries relative to their defence spending, etc. In this post I want to show a bit about the industry.

From the information of last year’s book, we find that of the 10 world biggest defence companies 6 are US companies and 4 European, though the biggest one is the British BAE Systems.

Among the first hundred companies (121 including subsidiaries) there are 4 Spanish: CASA (EADS), Navantia, Indra and Santa Barbara (General Dynamics). This places Spain as the 7th country by number of large defence companies. SIPRI publishes as well a fact sheet titled “Trends in International Arms Transfer”; in that one (data from 2005-2009) Spain is placed as the 8th country by arms exports.

Countries by number of large defence companies.

Countries by defence sales.

Finally, with the information provided by SIPRI I built the following (simplified) table where you may see which are the biggest defence companies by revenues and see how much of their business is relying on defence activities (big conglomerates like GE or UTC do not rely heavily on defence).

Defence companies by defence revenues and reliance on defence.

It is also interesting to look at the previous picture but isolating only the US companies…

US Defence companies by defence revenues and reliance on defence.

… and then taking a look at European ones:

European Defence companies by defence revenues and reliance on defence.

You may see that the top-right corner is almost exclusive domain of US companies, except for BAE, which has a big presence in the US defence market.

In this latest table you would see how the complete picture (with all 121 companies) would look like, with an atomization of smaller companies at the bottom.

Complete picture with 121 companies.

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February 25, 2010 · 1:13 am

Most desired company to work for in Spain…

Today Spanish financial press gave some coverage to a study performed by Randstad, “Employer Branding: cuando la percepción puede convertirse en realidad”. To compile this study Randstad interviewed 10.000 workers between 18 and 65 years old in Spain.

Workers were asked what issues they considered most important at the time of choosing a company to work for, the highest rated ones were:

  1. Long-term stability, 69% of respondents.
  2. Better salaries, 67%.
  3. Good atmosphere in the workplace, 57%…

Most important factors when selecting a company to work for

Randstad found a high variability between men and women respondents and between different age groups.

…

After this introduction… what I wanted to say: EADS CASA (Airbus Military) was rated by respondents as the most desirable company to work for. (period)

Other remarkable companies: GlaxoSmithKline, Nokia Spain, Pfizer, Correos, Coca-Cola and Iberdrola.

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