The aircraft industry is amongst the highest of high-tech sectors of the economy. It's never recovered from the COVID-19 lockdowns and the resultant disruption in supply. The air freight market has boomed, as a result of turbulence in ocean shipping, but can't get enough freighter aircraft to meet the demand.
Israel Aerospace Industries’ (IAI) conversion programme for Boeing 777s is behind schedule.
. . .
IAI is not the only aerospace company behind schedule with its conversion programme. Elbe Flugzeugwerke, the joint-venture of Airbus and ST Aerospace for Airbus passenger-to-freighter conversions, revealed in October it would miss its target of turning 12 A330s into all-cargo configuration this year and would be struggling to complete more than eight.
The situation is not much better in new aircraft productions: after turning out 51 planes in September, Boeing managed only 35 in October, and with 122 new orders signed that month, the backlog continued to grow.
Airbus delivered 68 commercial aircraft in November, but this was not enough to keep the company on track to meet its 2022 target. A few days ago it officially acknowledged it would not be able to achieve “around 700” deliveries this year, after all.
The aerospace industry has become a poster child for broken supply chains under the long shadow of Covid. Aircraft production and conversions have been hobbled by shortages of labour and parts from raw materials and rivets to microchips and engines.
And the problem is not confined to any specific sector or geography, nor to size of suppliers, as Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury stressed at the end of November.
The meltdown started during the pandemic, which severely disrupted aerospace supply chains. Built on the just-in-time concept, they were not able to cope with problems of quarantines, disrupted schedules, large-scale flight cancellations and travel restrictions. While those issues have largely disappeared, parts shortages and lengthy delays remain chronic and the repercussions of the war in Ukraine and continuing lockdowns in China have exacerbated the problems, Mr Faury said.
And his outlook on a return to normal is bleak. He said: “We believe we will be operating in this supply constraint environment for at least a year.”
Other industry executives are citing wait times of ten or 11 months for certain parts and, with more than 10,000 parts used in a conversion of an aircraft, this opens a veritable Pandora’s box of potential for bottlenecks and disruption.
There's more at the link.
These shortages have led to the bizarre situation of perfectly good aircraft being bought to be broken up for spare parts, rather than to operate them. For example:
AAR Supply Chain is to acquire nine Boeing 757-200 passenger jets and their 18 Rolls-Royce RB211 engines from American Airlines to provide spare parts for freighter aircraft.
“The acquisition of these aircraft and engines will enable AAR to continue to support the RB211-powered 757 cargo market,” says Brian Salvatori, AAR’s vice-president of asset trading.
Again, more at the link. (The 757 is a popular freighter: for example, FedEx flies over 100 of them.)
I understand that some conversion specialists, who are taking older airliners and gutting them to become freighters, are having to obtain parts via the same route, because original equipment manufacturers are concentrating on parts for more modern aircraft and don't have the time or the capacity to produce spares for older planes.
I wonder how many spare parts for passenger-carrying aircraft are coming from similar sources? I'm sure the airlines will argue that "used" spare parts are thoroughly checked and safe to operate, but it's not a comforting feeling for passengers to ponder the thought.
There's also the ongoing (and worsening) problem of counterfeit spare parts coming from China and infiltrating the supply chain. Such parts haven't been built and/or documented to the safety standards required by US administrators, and have demonstrated poorer reliability. Some have been so shoddily made that they're a danger to the aircraft on which they're fitted; fatal crashes have resulted.
The combination of factors shows how the supply chain problems revealed by COVID-19 have been elevated to a whole new level of risk in the air (and probably in other forms of travel as well). Not a comforting thought, if one has to fly somewhere . . .
Peter
Sigh, but, but, but THEY SAID "All is Well, go about your day in peace".
ReplyDeleteAs a flaming and exploding building is behind the Reporter on TV.
Praying for wisdom
Stuff like this is but a fever on a cancer crushed patient.
Protect your family and trusted friends
The issue with parts for older aircraft is analogous to similar situations for older cars and ammo availability for older calibers.
ReplyDeleteWhen supply is restricted, it's easier and usually more profitable to focus on large runs of a few popular parts than set up multiple times for small runs of less common parts.
As far as used parts, they are supposed to be checked to a rigorous standard; as long as that standard is met, I'd prefer them to new parts of uncertain origin and quality.
The tsa killed the airline industry as far as I am concerned.
ReplyDeleteI will not pay to be groped.
You write, "I'm sure the airlines will argue that "used" spare parts are thoroughly checked and safe to operate, but it's not a comforting feeling for passengers to ponder the thought."
ReplyDeleteSo ponder the thought that after the first flight, *every* part on the airplane is now a used part. :-)
Seriously, though, at least in the US, used parts do get inspected and checked before being approved for continued use. If it's a life-limited part (e.g., "replace after 1000 hours use"), the time it's been in use is documented and continues with the part. That doesn't stop fraud, of course, but it does make it much more likely that a used part is actually still suitable for use.
Hey Peter;
ReplyDeleteYeah counterfeit parts are a big concern, my employer is a FAR 121 carrier and all parts HAVE to have an 8130 parts certificate and it is verified by our inspectors before the parts are accepted and we harvest our own older airplanes to keep our fleet in the air. "Fake" parts is a big deal, it affects the airworthiness of the plane and potentially the safety of the passengers. The War in the Ukraine has Russia dealing in counterfeit parts to keep their western planes in the air.
Like this is something new!?!?! Did someone just wake up to the fact that parts for old aircraft are hard to get? It's always been the case.
ReplyDeleteFun fact: China has been making parts for Boeing since the mid-'80s. Another fun fact: If a part gets attached to an assembly and is removed. It's a 'used' part that has to be reinspected and certified as usable before it can be reused. Most of the time, it is cheaper to scrap it than re-certify it.
how much of this problem is due to the difficulty in getting a part certified?
ReplyDeleteTesla was able to keep production up because they could swap out chips and adapt the boards and software to match. Getting an updated board certified for airliners would be a multi-year effort
David Lang
The business of freighter conversions is pretty much all old aircraft, and has little or nothing to do with new production.
ReplyDeleteThe 757-200's being converted are OLD, about 25 years in this case. And Boeing hasn't built one since 2004.
LOTS of used parts come from desert "Boneyards" to keep the existing fleets going. It actually made the news a few months ago when a company in Ireland acquired the first two 787's destined to be stripped for parts.
That's ok, the coming economic meltdown is going to fix this problem by removing demand. Most of these companies will be desperate to unload portions of their fleet to reduce debt within a year, two at the outside.
ReplyDeleteIt is as Judy says. Unapproved parts has been a great concern in the commercial and general aviation fleets for a very long time. The response to the kung flu has, at most, only exacerbated a long time problem.
ReplyDeleteI find fault in the FAA for creating much of the problem. The reasoning is as shown in comments here, i.e, the certification process.
FAA and certification. BIG part of the cost of aircraft. Example: Cessna has built the same aircraft (c-172) since the mid-50's. Over 44 thousand of them. The latest production plane costs just under a HALF-million dollars! For a small, slow, 4ish seat private plane. It never got cheaper, it always got more expensive, due almost entirely to the FAA. They should be selling that many every year...
ReplyDeleteAfter the Aloha Airlines incident in 1988 where a portion of the fuselage blew off the FAA and other civil aviation regulators started putting life limits on the airframes. The Aloha 737 had almost 90,000 pressurization cycles on it. A cycle occurs when the fuselage is pressurized. At 35,000ft atmospheric pressure is 3.47psi but inside the cabin the pressure is maintained at 9,000ft or 10.5psi for a psid (pounds square inch differential) of 7.03psi. The fuselage actually gets longer by 1/8th of an inch and expands in diameter as well. This expansion will cause micro-cracking, eventually the micro-cracks will join together and the skin which is a structural element will crack and fail. Likewise the wings can have life limits as they flex upwards in flight (and in turbulence) and downwards on landing.
ReplyDeleteWhen an aircraft hits it's life limit of cycles the fuselage is worthless, except for recycling. There are lots of valuable rebuildable components attached to the fuselage that are unique to that model, such as the windshields, landing gear, control surfaces, power control units that move the control surfaces, flap actuators, yaw dampers, flight director/auto pilot units etc. and of course the engines which can be rebuilt forever theoretically. Just before I retired a big concern at our meetings was the landing gear set for our DHC-7. Only 113 were ever built, the last in 1988, and there are no spare landing gear available, so a tiny bit of corrosion on an axle would ground the aircraft for months.
Al_in_Ottawa