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A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

nytimes.com

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Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#111

Post by thoraway25455 »

Jtsummers wrote: post #45
erentz wrote: post #31

This was the most striking part to me: "According to The Seattle Times, the starting rate at the Airbus plant, about $16.50 per hour, is comparable to the starting wages at Boeing’s passenger-plane plant in Renton, Wash. But the Airbus pay scale tops out at $23 an hour, while experienced Boeing workers can earn $45." We now have so much surplus labor that even this relatively skilled job only pays $16.50 an hour.

Unions. Alabama doesn't have effective unions. You'll see similar differences in top-end pay in other Right to Work states compared to states like Washington with more effective unions and greater ability of employees to participate in collective bargaining.

> Right to Work

How and why do Americans tolerate this sort of newspeak? Are you brainwashed to accept it from birth?

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#112

Post by sandworm101 »

jessriedel wrote: post #96
sandworm101 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A factory won't just casually add a degree requirement. That has implications. In a union environment this may require a higher pay scale. If they increase the minimum standards for a current job they may have to retrain people. There may also be a trickle effect on managers who may too now need degrees. So whereas a startup may just start requiring degrees to weed out candidates, a large employer like a factory (or government) won't do so unless necessary.

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.

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#113

Post by ajmurmann »

7952 wrote: post #61
ajmurmann wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we are all talking about globalization being the culprit which to me is a huge distraction from the actual problem: automation. I wonder if it's not a bigger part of the national debate because it would require politics to say that currently unemployed likely will remain not needed and call for something like basic income guarantee which is in essence a gateway to something very similar to communism.

> a gateway to something very similar to communism. 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.

If you haven't done so already, I think you'd very much enjoy the Econtalk episode with John Cochrane: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/09/john_cochrane_o.htm...

He argues in favor of decluttering the policy tools you listed. Sounds excellent to me.

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#114

Post by howard941 »

jonknee wrote: post #92
jrf6 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

As was the hope Airbus would land the Air Force tanker contract it lost to Boeing.

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#115

Post by convivialdingo »

JustAnotherPat wrote: post #71
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…

You probably need a decent amount of engineers at each of those locations. Different types of engineers. I doubt you can convince enough of them to move to Mobile. Plus at the end of the day, how much more does it cost to ship assembled pieces vs. raw material?

Alabama has a long history of space & aviation engineering... you wouldn't have to go far to find experienced engineers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Space_Flight_Center

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#116

Post by neepster »

erentz wrote: post #31

This was the most striking part to me: "According to The Seattle Times, the starting rate at the Airbus plant, about $16.50 per hour, is comparable to the starting wages at Boeing’s passenger-plane plant in Renton, Wash. But the Airbus pay scale tops out at $23 an hour, while experienced Boeing workers can earn $45." We now have so much surplus labor that even this relatively skilled job only pays $16.50 an hour.

You get what you pay for to some extent too... as Mercedes found out, German Engineering is no match for Alabama manufacturing....

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#117

Post by JustSomeNobody »

iplaw wrote: post #26

One of my uncles has worked for Bell, Boeing, and Lockheed for the last 30 years. The mechanical complexity of aircraft, and the ability for a blue collar worker to master a niche aerospace trade, never ceases to amaze me.

What amazes me is that 50 years ago a plane like the SR-71 was designed on paper and turned out amazing. Fast forward to today and you have the over-engineered piece of expensive garbage that is the F-35.

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#118

Post by PhantomGremlin »

valuearb wrote: post #72
byroot wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, and I also heard from an Airbus engineer friend, that airlines try to diversify their planes so that in case a specific plane model is grounded by the FAA (or equivalent) the impact is less severe.

That's impossible. 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 fli…

airlines would suffer massively if any type is grounded

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...

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#119

Post by MagnumOpus »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #117
iplaw wrote: post #26

One of my uncles has worked for Bell, Boeing, and Lockheed for the last 30 years. The mechanical complexity of aircraft, and the ability for a blue collar worker to master a niche aerospace trade, never ceases to amaze me.

What amazes me is that 50 years ago a plane like the SR-71 was designed on paper and turned out amazing. Fast forward to today and you have the over-engineered piece of expensive garbage that is the F-35.

> SR-71 was designed on paper and turned out amazing

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.)

Re: A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line

#120

Post by noir_lord »

tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote: post #32
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…

The split is political. It can be quite inefficient: When the Airbus A380 was in development, the non-unified production caused severe delays because only at assembly did Airbus discover that the electric cables are not long enough to connect the different plane parts[1]. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/business/worldbusiness/11i...

I'm trying to remember where I read about Airbus designing the plane in two different places and when they built the thing it turned out that one place was using version X-1 and the other X and that caused really subtle problems with alignment.

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.

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