A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line • Hacker News Board

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#91

Post by valuearb » Wed, May 03, 2017, 4:20 PM UTC

strictnein wrote: post #77

danmaz74 wrote: post #6

> Almost a third of American factory workers now hold four-year college degrees, a trend that reflects the increasingly cerebral nature of the work. Wow.

There was an article a couple months ago about this. > “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-...

That's an article about how Siemens offers internships to high school graduates, so unless you don't count internships as jobs, there is at least one loophole in that statement.

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.

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#92

Post by jonknee » Wed, May 03, 2017, 4:21 PM UTC

jrf6 wrote: post #30

omegant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like this due to political reasons, nothing to do with eficiency.

The article also cited the lower wages in Alabama. The pay scale tops out at $23 an hour, and the workforce is not unionized.

The $158m in incentives that Alabama paid were also part of it:

http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/09/big_incentives_at_s...

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#93

Post by valuearb » Wed, May 03, 2017, 4:22 PM UTC

rospaya wrote: post #48

jamiek88 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I went through the same process, obviously in hindsight it is a tube, all that can remain is the bottom half of the circle underneath the floor. 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…

> 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? Four EU countries, soon to be only three. That's not purposefully spread, but the result of history and politics.

You don't think that history and politics were the purpose for forming Airbus?

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#94

Post by csours » Wed, May 03, 2017, 4:31 PM UTC

hawski wrote: post #7

Looking at those pictures I wonder how assembly, from unloading cargo to final testing, could be fully automated. I came to think that until we automate automation it will be quite hard. Humans with assist of tools are flexible enough - especially on this scale.

A more pertinent question is: What can be automated in a cost effective manner?

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!

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#95

Post by microDude » Wed, May 03, 2017, 4:33 PM UTC

A lot of this article talks about the US government subsidies and back rubbing required to sell to the US market. What about the reverse case? What is required to sell Boeing planes in Europe?

Last time I checked there are a lot of protectionism clauses surrounding EU aerospace markets.

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#96

Post by jessriedel » Wed, May 03, 2017, 4:42 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #74

jessriedel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you tell the difference?

The job postings say "must have undergraduate in X".

Oh OK, but this doesn't really distinguish between "market forces mean that unnecessary degrees make an applicant more competative" and "the job actually requires the knowledge/skills learned in college" (my words). Lots of businesses will just say "requires a college degree" on the job ad as a filtering mechanism.

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#97

Post by barrkel » Wed, May 03, 2017, 4:48 PM UTC

sargun wrote: post #85

josefresco wrote: post #58

"American workers expect things to go wrong and then they fix it" I found this this interesting, also that it was said by a 25 year old manager.

I think the latter part of this quote is disappointing: American workers expect things to go wrong and then they fix it,” said Freddie Guinness, 25, who moved to Mobile from Ireland to manage the new facility. “We want it to go right the first time.” 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 othe…

If you've got a process where each stage has as its input a previous stage, improving the whole process depends not on fixing the inputs, but fixing the output of the previous stage. Getting into a habit of local fixes and workarounds may lead to a more resilient process, but it's also a less globally efficient one; fixes accumulate and the knowledge of brokenness stays local.

There are direct analogues with software engineering, particularly in maintenance of large or legacy systems - local fixes is how global architecture degrades.

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#98

Post by nrki » Wed, May 03, 2017, 4:54 PM UTC

owenversteeg wrote: post #89

sethbannon wrote: post #16

The vivid color contrasts in these photos make them visually stunning, but do they serve any functional purpose?

The photos are absolutely gorgeous, and it looks like whoever's taking them has some seriously expensive glass. I'm guessing that someone in charge wanted the photos to "pop" and the contrast got boosted just slightly too much. In my opinion it doesn't ruin the photos, and it's only really visible in a handful of them.

Probably a combo of that and circular polarizers.

edit: for the outside shots.

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#99

Post by munificent » Wed, May 03, 2017, 4:58 PM UTC

"It helps that in Alabama, labor is cheap. Airbus set a goal that building planes in the United States would not cost a penny more than building in Europe. It is expensive to ship parts from Hamburg, but because the Mobile workers are not unionized, Airbus can hire fewer of them and pay them lower wages."

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.

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#100

Post by Geekette » Wed, May 03, 2017, 5:50 PM UTC

omegant wrote: post #27

prplhaz4 wrote: post #25

These are some massive sub-assemblies being carted all over the world...it's surprising to me that there aren't more localized efficiencies, or that this global Lego set doesn't always have more missing pieces than its worth. Rear Fuselage: Hamburg, Germany Vertical Stabilizer: Stade, Germany Forward Fuselage: Saint-Nazaire, France Wings: Broughton, Wales Engines: Middletown, Connecticuit Final Assembly: Mobile, Alab…

It's like this due to political reasons, nothing to do with eficiency.

Did you read the article? It's as much if not more for economic reasons: Airbus realized that it could get more lucrative US military contracts by having local bases and chose factory locations partly for historical trends (of having facilities serving military-industrial complex) as well as other factors like lower cost and tax subsidies from choosen locations.