Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

Desperately keen to present a positive image here at Le Bourget following the past two years’ industrial troubles, Airbus is working to ensure the support of production-line workers for its proposals to rationalize the business. Airbus plans to improve earnings before interest and tax by a cumulative $6.6 billion during by 2010 and to generate an additional $2.8 billion annual revenue from 2010.
The move to win over workers had an inauspicious start on June 6 after Airbus presented the “new, simplified and streamlined” structure to its European Works Council. Employees at three German sites earmarked for disposal went on strike in protest to the plans, but the manufacturer claimed to expect no consequent impact on production.
Dubbed Power8, the restructure aims to improve and rationalize internal company processes after September, making Airbus “a real architect and integrator in airliner development,” according to chief executive Louis Gallois. This month Airbus is continuing negotiations that began in May with partner countries France, Germany, Spain and the UK to agree appropriate “social measures” to compensate for proposed job losses over the next four years.
As part of the rationalization, Airbus proposes disposal of six factories: two in France, three German plants and a single British unit. While no decisions had been made by last week, more than a dozen companies have reportedly expressed interest in possible acquisition of various sites. 
Under the Power8 plan, operations, programs and procurement functions will become “transnational.” Within Operations, so-called “centers of excellence” will concentrate on fuselage and cabin, wing and pylon (strut), aft fuselage and empennage and aerostructures responsibilities. Each will involve work performed in more than one Airbus partner country.
The programs function will deal with customers’ noncommercial needs, final assembly and cabin definition and installation, and includes the right to intervene between airlines and factories in delivery commitments.
Airbus finance and personnel organizations are to be combined with other key functions, although social relations, tax obligations and other specific country-related issues will be handled locally through “national representatives.”
Procurement will be trans-national with materials for all partner countries being obtained from single sources in line with Airbus policy to reduce numbers of first-tier suppliers and to gain greater industrial control. Accordingly, this month Airbus has signed a “commitment charter” aimed at enhancing long-term supply-base links. 
Under the scheme, suppliers are to become more integrated in Airbus aircraft development, from design to “after-life” recycling and will receive greater visibility in the manufacturer’s planning processes. The company is to advise on creation of a network of Tier One partners that will share investment and costs.
Globally, Airbus has joined a United Nations initiative that aims to bring together corporate business with UN agencies, civil society, and government in attempts to advance 10 human-rights, labor, environment and anticorruption principles.

Airbus takes need for job cuts to its workers

Desperately keen to present a positive image here at Le Bourget following the past two years’ industrial troubles, Airbus is working to ensure the support 

2024 Corporate Aviation Leadership Summit

Paris Air Show 2007

AIN Products

SUBSCRIPTIONS

RESOURCES

ABOUT AIN