Airbus expects the supply chain crisis gripping the global aerospace industry to last until next year while suppliers struggle to increase production as the world emerges from the pandemic.
Guillaume Faury, chief executive of the world’s largest plane maker, said the crisis would not be resolved in the next two or three months.
“We guess, a year as an order of magnitude. We have difficulties to believe that in two years from now it’s not going to be resolved. This is not unusual. It is just the depth and magnitude of what’s happening [which] is more than what we’ve seen in previous crises,” Faury told the Financial Times at the Farnborough Air Show.
Like other global manufacturers, including US rival Boeing, Airbus is struggling with shortages of raw materials, electronic components and other parts.
“It’s bad everywhere . . . The global supply chains have real difficulties to operate normally and it’s not just an aerospace issue,” Faury said, adding that for the industry, the constraints were also happening “at the moment of demand”.
Other challenges, he added, included industry-wide labour shortages, as well as higher inflation and energy costs.
Airbus is working on contingency plans to ensure its main manufacturing operations in Europe can continue to operate if there are energy shortages this winter.
In Germany, the government has asked large industrial users to make preparations for a potential cut-off of gas supplies from Russia.
Faury said the group was exploring options for cutting energy use, including asking some people to work from home again.
“We also have ideas to work in sequence differently to reduce the peak energy that is required.” He added that the company was starting to talk to governments to explore options and come up with adaptations.
In the supply chain, deliveries of engines have been a particular issue, he said.
Airbus now has 26 “gliders” — aircraft that have been built but are sitting in storage without engines. This is a particular issue for Airbus as it plans to increase production of its best-selling family of A320 jets to 75 a month by 2025, with an interim target to reach 65 a month by the middle of 2023 from about 50 currently.
Faury said he thought the company was “at the low point” of the problem but expressed frustration with engine manufacturers. “Not all engine makers started early enough to ramp up again, in spite of what we told them. Some of them waited too long.”
CFM International, the joint venture between Safran and GE, and Pratt & Whitney, which both provide A320 engines, had however signalled they were back on track, he said, adding he expected Airbus to have no remaining gliders by the end of the year.
In separate interviews, Olivier Andriès CEO of Safran, and Greg Hayes, CEO of Raytheon, the US group that owns Pratt & Whitney, both acknowledged the problems.
Andries said the industry had “swung from an unprecedented demand shock in 2020 to an unprecedented supply shock today”.
“When the traffic started to come back in the summer of 2021, the [plane makers] asked us to reverse gear — to accelerate like hell,” he added, noting that his focus for now was on the recovery and meeting targets in 2023.
Hayes told the FT that the company had, as predicted in February, ended the first half of the year about 70 engines behind schedule. “We ended about 70 behind and we’ve got a path to recovery, but it’s taken a lot longer and more resources than we thought.”
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