
A Look Inside Airbus’s Alabama Assembly Line - rdli
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/magazine/a-look-inside-airbuss-epic-assembly-line.html
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erentz
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.

~~~
JBReefer
You're overestimating both the level of skill required to start and the cost
of living in Alabama.

Alabama is CHEAP, and taxes are very low.

~~~
needz
8th lowest CoL in the USA and a pretty great place to live. Glad to call
Birmingham my home.

~~~
jlappi
Jasper here, even cheaper. A neat little town not too far from the Ham.

~~~
needz
Currently two miles from work with dirt-cheap rent while I build up my nest
egg. Late twenties, single and enjoying the convenient nightlife. I'll gladly
move when it's time to though (better school systems and all those family-
life-community benefits).

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prplhaz4
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, Alabama

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

~~~
prplhaz4
But doesn't a business have to, at some point, meet a minimum level of
efficiency to still be viable? Do subsidies and mandates make up for all that
slack?

~~~
SimbaOnSteroids
It's not just subsidies and mandates, it's large government contracts on maybe
not actually needed systems. See the F-35 as an example of this, which has
parts manufactured in a majority of states meaning it's impossible for
congress to nix this sort of program because it would cost constituents jobs.
Also how it makes it harder for congressmen and women to vote against these
sorts of deals because it would cost their constituents future jobs.

I don't know about Airbus in particular but this is how it generally work with
companies like Lockheed and Boeing.

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josefresco
"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.

~~~
sargun
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 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.

~~~
barrkel
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.

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danmaz74
> 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.

~~~
sandworm101
Im waiting for "one third of factory jobs _require_ a four-year degree" before
getting to excites about cerebral natures. There are a great number of people
with degrees out there. I want to see that the jobs require the education to
do the work, not that market forces mean that unnecessary degrees make an
applicant more competative.

~~~
jessriedel
How would you tell the difference?

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sandworm101
The job postings say "must have undergraduate in X".

~~~
jessriedel
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.

~~~
sandworm101
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.

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munificent
"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.

~~~
jdminhbg
The per capita GDP of Alabama is $5k higher than that of (e.g.) France:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=per+capita+gdp+of+alaba...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=per+capita+gdp+of+alabama+and+france)

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6d6b73
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/05/07/magazine/07airbus...](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/05/07/magazine/07airbus-
slide-QGOR/07airbus-slide-QGOR-superJumbo.jpg)

"Beware of propeller" seems like a strange name for a ship :)

~~~
wohlergehen
The real name is actually painted at the top. It's BBC Volga [1]. Currently in
the Bahamas.

1: [https://www.vesselfinder.com/de/vessels/BBC-VOLGA-
IMO-943632...](https://www.vesselfinder.com/de/vessels/BBC-VOLGA-
IMO-9436329-MMSI-304043000)

~~~
strictnein
The BBC is really branching out.

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keehun
It's surprising to me how small the cargo-hold is. I've always imagined it to
be a lot bigger, but now that I think about it (having seen it), it makes a
lot of sense..

~~~
jamiek88
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 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.

~~~
rospaya
> 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.

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

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chiph
So Mobile is to Airbus as Charleston is to Boeing.

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microDude
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.

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hawski
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.

~~~
awalton
The question is how much of it should be automated that isn't already. It's
not like they're building 737s and A321s for everyone - at some point, human
labor just makes better business sense, though I admit I have no idea where
those lines are - I don't have the factory experience to tell you.

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.

~~~
coredog64
They are already built like that. In Boeing parlance it is called a section.
Smaller sections are built and then joined together at final assembly.

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iplaw
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.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
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.

~~~
MagnumOpus
> 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.)

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

~~~
owenversteeg
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.

~~~
L_Rahman
The photographer is Christopher Payne who does a lot of work that looks at
humans making things. The colors and how they're treated in these photos is a
product of his specific aesthetic:

[http://lenscratch.com/2016/08/christopher-payne-making-
stein...](http://lenscratch.com/2016/08/christopher-payne-making-steinway/)

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Gravityloss
Fascinating to see something made not in China, and even the components don't
come from there. (I realize they also do assembly and produce some components
in China too.)

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yzmtf2008
Why the hostility?

~~~
Gravityloss
I didn't intend to sound hostile?

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bigtones
I'm disappointed American Airlines don't buy all Boeing planes, especially
given their name. Although Airbus planes do have some American parts on them,
they're mostly European. Considering they got USD$15 Billion in bailout money
from the US Government, and just how good Boeing planes are at a very similar
price point, supporting manufacturing in their country of origin seems like
the right thing to do.

~~~
criddell
> supporting manufacturing in their country of origin seems like the right
> thing to do

Where do you think Mobile, Alabama is?

~~~
pdelbarba
Realistically though, if you buy IKEA furniture and assemble it at home, it's
not "made in my bedroom". The vast majority of the value created in the
process of of creating an A321 will be overseas. Assembling it here is just a
gimmick, for better or for worse.

