"Dolores" crippled Airbus

The aviation concern lacks qualified personnel

The deep crisis in which the European aerospace concern EADS has been in recent months remains in the spotlight, even despite the successful Farnborough Air Show for Airbus. Yesterday in the newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt, Rüdiger Lütjen, head of the EADS labor council, expressed his opinion about the causes of the problems of Airbus (part of the concern).

He believes that the main culprit for the failures of EADS and Airbus in the competition with the American corporation Boeing was a savings program called “Dolores”. It is because of the staff reductions envisaged in this document that Airbus's design and production sites in Germany are short of approximately 700 engineering and technical employees. The opinion of his “superior” colleague is shared by the head of the labor council of the Hamburg Airbus aircraft plant, Horst Niehus. He is convinced that manufacturing today is suffering from the consequences of the austerity measures introduced in Dolores.

The Dolores program was imposed by Daimler-Benz (now DaimlerChrysler) on its aerospace subsidiary DASA, the predecessor of the EADS concern, in the mid-90s.

The former management of EADS, who left the concern due to a scandal surrounding problems with the development of the Airbus A380 and delays in delivery to customers, primarily blames the Hamburg plant. Mr. Niehus believes that such criticism is far-fetched: “There are not enough qualified employees precisely where we are talking about particularly critical positions in electrical and electronics.” Both Airbus itself and related suppliers “underestimated the complexity of the aircraft.”

Rüdiger Lütjen spoke about what this looks like in reality in Hamburg. At the group's local design office, approximately a thousand engineers and technicians create electronic components for the A380. However, about 4/5 of such nodes come from “outside”, from subcontractors. Moreover, the enterprise does not have a structure that adequately coordinates the work of both.

In response to this criticism, an Airbus executive simply noted that these facts contain nothing new. And he announced that the concern had decided to hire 1,250 new employees. "We need to improve the production process," an Airbus spokesman admitted. A corresponding process improvement plan will be adopted by September. At the recent Farnborough Air Show, the new chief of Airbus, Christian Streiff, promised to “sort out” the entire chain of suppliers of components and parts for the Airbus A380.

Yuri Shpakov, Berlin