A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We now have so much surplus labor that even this relatively skilled job only pays $16.50 an hour.
Alabama is CHEAP, and taxes are very low.
At least it would be explicit. Western economies tend to have income redistribution in various forms anyway. It just gets mixed up in tax rates, tax credits, service subsidies and entitlements. People have little idea what the flows of money really look like.
He argues in favor of decluttering the policy tools you listed. Sounds excellent to me.
Here's[0] a 3 bedroom, 2 bath home for 170k within 4 miles of the plant
and here's[1] an even less expensive one under 5 miles from the plant
If you look at the rental market, you can get apartments and small single family homes from around $300 per bedroom
[0]https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/307-Michigan-Ave-Mobile-A... [1]https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/210-Mohawk-St-Mobile-AL-3...
You can't have a discussion about pay levels without accounting for total compensation. These are good jobs that pay well given it's an employer trained position that unskilled laborers could get.
Alabama disagrees: https://labor.alabama.gov/inspections/unions.aspx
In any case, there are plenty of high end manufacturers in the american south. BMW and Boeing in SC, just off the top of my head, for example. Stereotypes are wrong, sometimes.
Rear Fuselage: Hamburg, Germany
Vertical Stabilizer: Stade, Germany
Forward Fuselage: Saint-Nazaire, France
Wings: Broughton, Wales
Engines: Middletown, Connecticuit
Final Assembly: Mobile, Alabamahttp://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/09/big_incentives_at_s...
I don't know about Airbus in particular but this is how it generally work with companies like Lockheed and Boeing.
I would think that building planes, as expensive as they are, would mean that you would want to sell them to everyone. In order to sell in a country, you probably have to commit to building (or assembling) some parts of it in that country. Breaking it up the way they did probably is as efficient as they can make it now. I guess we'll see in some years how that turns out financially for them.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/business/worldbusiness/11i...
I'm sure it was Airbus but I can't find the article.
EDIT: Found it http://calleam.com/WTPF/?p=4700
Offtopic but the "Catalogue of Catastrophe" is a damn good read http://calleam.com/WTPF/?page_id=3
Basically a "why things failed/cost a fortune that shouldn't" list for large projects.
I found this this interesting, also that it was said by a 25 year old manager.
How much does cautiousness result in increased productivity versus having the ability to have reactive responses to things going wrong? I've found this behaviour in other orgs, and often it was used an excuse not to train people to have the capability to remediate, but only to do what they're trained to do.
Also, as far as the age goes -- that's not that unusual for a line manager in manufacturing. Assuming they started working at ~22, 3 years in one plant can definitely make you a line manager.
There are direct analogues with software engineering, particularly in maintenance of large or legacy systems - local fixes is how global architecture degrades.
Wow.
I'm just starting that rare job that insists on a "four year degree plus other post-graduate education" but isn't specific as to which degrees they want. That really cuts down on candidates. Of the dozen interviews, I will instantly be higher up in the organization than ten of the people who interviewed me. They didn't take the education requirements lightly.
Somehow college dropouts built the PC industry, and the internet economy, and we still worship a diploma that is almost only ever used as a point of entry to the job market, then discarded immediately.
> “People on the plant floor need to be much more skilled than they were in the past. There are no jobs for high school graduates at Siemens today.”
These jobs also pay well (for factory work). $40k for a starting job at a John Deere factory. $50-$80k pay range at a Siemens factory.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/education/edlife/factory-...
Clearly Siemens sets high standards for who they want to hire and attempts to use college degrees as a filtering mechanism. But the entire article is about how trainable the workforce needs to be, and starts by talking about how high school graduates are flunking basic math skills needed.
You can learn anywhere. There is nothing special about university for the vast majority of people to learn there.
Fortunately thanks to the internet it's easier than ever to learn technical skills today, if you have any sort of work ethic and desire.
I think that's the money quote of the article. Large multinational corporations have a long history of moving factory work to cheaper third world countries.
Economic disparity has gotten so bad in the US in the past couple of decades that, effectively, places like Alabama now qualify as "third world" in that economic game.
"Beware of propeller" seems like a strange name for a ship :)
1: https://www.vesselfinder.com/de/vessels/BBC-VOLGA-IMO-943632...
Fascinating look at those part assembled planes.
Interesting how a politics is just as 'real' as economics - the plane is purposefully built around the EU to spread the jobs and buy in from member nations, why not include the US in that too?
With the UK leaving the EU I can see those parts being moved to the US and more being done here. Pity it's because 'cheap labour' though -having said that the cost of living in Mobile, AL is a lot lower than the European sites I'll wager.
Unless Airbus finds it useful to keep factories in the UK, to sell to British airlines and the British military.
Or, because there's so much other aerospace in the UK -- Wikipedia has a huge list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospace_industry_in_the_Unit...
Broughton in Wales is not an expensive area. It's not too far from Liverpool.
But see that's the part that got me. I subconsciously thought (without logic) that the passenger cabin part is the upper half and the cargo is just as big as the top half. Actually, the passenger side is much more than the half, and it looks like they've crammed in a lot of things in the remaining bottom portion, making the cargo hold even smaller.
Four EU countries, soon to be only three. That's not purposefully spread, but the result of history and politics.
Last time I checked there are a lot of protectionism clauses surrounding EU aerospace markets.
No fasteners and large monolithic parts. Sometimes you need an autoclaves, sometimes not. Things like point loads would need to be designed out as much as possible.
Likely because of large existing investments, politics and path dependence, the new airliners built differently will have come from somewhere else.
Airbus itself did disrupt the market with composites back in the day with their first plane, and they have a multi megawatt class electric ones in the works, so who knows, maybe they can renew?
I would try to design a small plane - such as the next-gen Cessna - that could be built mostly by robots. Maybe hire most of the engineers from the carkmaker industry (Mercedes-Benz, Tesla). Then move up from there.
1. There aren't very many certificated pilots in the US (600k?), and a small fraction who fly regularly enough for owning a plane to make sense. Not a huge market.
2. This does nothing for operating costs. Fuel, maintenance, insurance, storage all mean that even for a small airplane, you should expect to spend $100 - 300 / hr for operating costs, depending on details of the plane and how often you fly. This means that the market really can't expand that much.
The best hope for putting lots of new airplanes in the air every year is a viable self-piloting VTOL electric aircraft. I don't see anything else doing it, and energy density of batteries means that we're probably decades away from that.
There's a bunch of reasons to automate, and replacing people is probably the last reason to do it (since often the people just get shifted to tasks which previously didn't have enough resources to do, sometimes those tasks pay off big)
These aircraft cost in the order of $100M and they are produced in the thousands across many years for the most successful models. And it is likely to stay this way, it's not like if someday, we'll all have our own personal Airbus.
The economies of scale don't justify a fully automatic assembly line.
The manufacturers fight it, but at the end of the day the customer is always right.
It's also likely they'd pretty significantly redesign a lot of the parts if they were going for more automation - a lot of aircraft construction is done in a way that makes it difficult even for humans to get decent access - the robots to get into those kinds of tight spaces to work would look more appropriate on the International Space Station, and may not be much faster at the job due to all of the extra maneuvering to get in and out of tight spaces. (In fact, on most existing aircraft designs, to do much with robots you'd almost certainly need a human operator standing by just to make sure it didn't accidentally punch through a firewall or the tin can hull, since a lot of assembly steps require moving fixtures around and installing temporaries for support, which may be more ad-hoc than planned procedure.
As an example of design and construction philosophies, both Boeing and Airbus have adopted a more "outside-in" approach to building aircraft, where the principal components of the airframe are built first and everything is fastened to them as construction evolves. This is a very human- and aircraft-centric construction philosophy, since it means the workers need to move around the plane a lot, rather than the plane's components coming to the workers. This works better with the scales in mind, since the aircraft are already constructed in some of the largest buildings on the planet, and moving large assemblies around a lot during construction means employee downtime and slower delivery performance.
But what if instead they took a tunnel building-like approach where the interior would be mostly assembly-line built in ring sections, fastened together into modular inner compartments, and then fitted to external fuselage pieces before everything is snapped together in one big final assembly step? The smaller sections work better for both humans and automation, and the larger pieces snapping together Lego-like means you can even reduce the need for as many large assembly buildings down to just final assembly. It could possibly be much better for composite construction, as it would mean fewer external seams on the aircraft (which in turn must suck for the carbon fiber engineers, since it means even larger autoclaves and components they would have to deal with), which in turn gives you even more of the advantages you already are seeing on planes like the Dreamliner (plus likely a much quieter cabin, since it would be better separated and insulated from the hull, and fewer fasteners means less vibration noise generated as well as shorter assembly times).
Of course, Boeing and Airbus are huge companies with lots of extreme long term planning when it comes to budgeting and logistics, so I doubt if either company will make revolutionary strides in this direction rather than evolutionary strides. With product deliveries over multiple decades and lifecycles approaching a century, it's easy to see why these companies are conservative and evolutionary.
People from outside manufacturing look at automation like it's a holy grail - and it can be in some applications - but it has to make sense.
Step 1 of the evaluation would be to look at how much it costs to have a human do those operations now. This should be relatively easy.
Step 2 would evaluate what process changes are needed to enable robots to perform the operations. A robot cannot handle the material to be assembled in the same way a human can, so often a human (or other automated system) "stages" material for a robot. Robots do not work well on moving pieces, so you may have to stop other operations for the robot, impacting efficiency. Robotic vision systems need to be set up and debugged, unlike human vision systems (which have typically had 20 years or so of self-programming)
For automation to work well, the whole process chain has to be designed for automation.
Step 3 would look at the raw cost of robotic components and programming, which is relatively easy.
Step 4 would then evaluate the value add per operation of the robotic system.
All in all, humans make excellent robots most of the time, as they come with Two Six-Axis arms with multi-articulated effectors (hands), and a sophisticated 3D vision system. Humans have an on-board, self-sustaining power system, and are very mobile. Some humans are even self-diagnosing and self-improving!
Try a Human Today!
Well, "amazing" is relative - it was a hastily constructed leaking bucket of kerosene, and within the first five years of its first sorties, one third of the planes have crashed and burned.
Not even Lockheed's other famous death trap - the F-104 Lawn Dart - was as dangerous as the SR-71.
(And of course the F-35 is supposed to be doing every single job under the sun rather than having a single purpose - hence it being outperformed by its Chinese single-purpose carbon copies already.)
High contrast also makes tiny colorful details easier to see.
I wonder if they're composite images, or just using some great lenses.
edit: for the outside shots.
http://lenscratch.com/2016/08/christopher-payne-making-stein...
Edit: As CoreDog said, it would be a cost nightmare. Already airlines would suffer massively if any type is grounded. Ground 737s or A321s? It would be like 9-11 all over again, shut down most every flight of almost every airline.
Even grounding a specific version of a type, like 737-700 would be difficult to handle for the airlines that fly them. Alaska would have to cancel nearly 10% of their flights. And it's hard to imagine how the FAA could ground the 737-700 and not the 737-800 at the same time given they are almost identical, which would ground 2/3s of Alaska's fleet.
Airlines can consolidate their fleets around a few specific models because it's super cost effective, and the chances of grounding any single model are virtually nil. 737s and A3xx have flown many billions of miles safely since their last incident, it's almost impossible to imagine a problems so urgent and dangerous it would require grounding an entire fleet of planes that flies safely every single day.
It's been done before, but IIRC not recently. Sometimes you have to slap a manufacturer and an operator with a gigantic clue-by-four in order to get them to take things seriously.
In 1979, after a crash where 271 people were killed, all DC-10s were grounded for about 5 weeks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Americ...
Southwest only flies 737s. In fact, they were so fussy about aircraft that Boeing had to _make_ them take an autopilot on the 737-700s that they bought.
Where do you think Mobile, Alabama is?
If you want to know how bad things get when you limit free trade, google Smoot-Hawley.