BY MOLLY McMILLIN
The Wichita Eagle
TOULOUSE, France — Airbus' sprawling headquarters in Toulouse, France, may be 5,000 miles from Wichita, but the link between Europe's largest planemaker and the Air Capital is strong and getting stronger."Wichita is a success story," Charles Champion, Airbus' executive vice president of engineering, said recently in his office in Toulouse.
Airbus' modern engineering office in the heart of Old Town opened in 2002. It now employs 300 engineers, with an average salary of $80,000, and continues to grow.
It's the largest of Airbus' engineering centers outside Europe and the largest U.S. Airbus facility.
Farther south in Wichita, Spirit AeroSystems has won work on Airbus' new A350XWB program. Spirit's overseas plants work on all Airbus products.
While Boeing is Spirit's largest customer, once the Airbus A350 program gets going, Airbus will represent more than 10 percent of Spirit's work, Spirit CEO Jeff Turner has said.
Last year, Airbus said it spent $88 million with Wichita-area suppliers, making Kansas ninth in terms of the company's state-by-state spending.
Airbus' presence here continues to grow despite harsh words about Airbus in the bitter Air Force tanker competition between Boeing, a U.S. company, and Airbus' parent company, European-based EADS. The fierce political battle finally ended when Boeing won the contract in February.
Former U.S. Rep. Todd Tiahrt and former Sen. and current Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback "totally ignored the Airbus footprint in Wichita with the tanker," said Leeham Cos. aviation analyst Scott Hamilton. "That was kind of poor taste.
"Having those jobs from Airbus over here is a good thing. It's even more important in the current economy."
Airbus has been good for the city, said Mayor Carl Brewer.
"They've been a great partner,'' he said.
"We're proud of Airbus, and we're proud of Boeing."
Because of Wichita's long ties with Boeing, sometimes people are surprised to learn of Airbus' presence here.
"When people find out we have both here," Brewer said, "they're a little impressed; in fact, they're shocked that we have them."
There's no reason Airbus shouldn't be doing more work in south-central Kansas, said John O'Leary, vice president of engineering for Airbus North America Engineering. O'Leary heads the Wichita office.
Gaining work, though, is based on making connections.
"Airbus and the French culture is very relationship based," O'Leary said. "You have to work inside that culture."
Wings from Wichita
Wichita's engineering acumen is apparent at Airbus' sprawling campus in Toulouse, where Airbus aircraft undergo final assembly inside facilities lining a runway.
Inside the cavernous A380 final assembly plant, the massive wings Wichita engineers helped design are attached to the fuselage, and the rest of the plane is assembled and completed.
The double-decker, wide-body airplane is the largest passenger jet in the world. Its width is equivalent to the length of a widebody aircraft.
The Wichita office contributed to various parts of the initial wing design, O'Leary said. Today about 70 percent of the A380's wing activity is in Wichita, he said.
The French plant builds about two A380s per month. That will increase next year, and eventually, the plan is to build four a month, officials said.
Besides the A380, Wichita's Airbus engineers work on all Airbus commercial airplanes, including the A330, A340, A320 and the new A350 XWB (for Extra Wide Body). It also has work on an upgraded version of the A320 that will have new engines.
The Wichita office will design the modifications to the A320 wing to carry the new engines, O'Leary said. It also may work on the pylons.
Airbus announced hundreds of orders for the upgraded A320, called the A320neo, at the Paris Air Show in June. It now has more than 1,000 orders for the single-aisle plane.
"Making all those sales just ratcheted up the pressure to get it done faster," O'Leary said of Wichita's part of the work.
But it was the A380 that led to the establishment of the Wichita office. Airbus needed to find engineers for the program, and it began to look at Wichita.
The thinking was "why not create over there an Airbus engineering center and get some good guys and get them working for Airbus," Champion said. "It started that way."
Legally, the Wichita site is part of Airbus Americas, a U.S. company paying U.S. taxes, Airbus said.
Operationally, it uses Airbus methods, tools and processes.
That's been one of the biggest challenges for Wichita engineers, Champion said.
"Airbus does things differently than U.S. companies; it does things differently from Boeing," O'Leary said. "Not better, not worse. Just different.
"When people come in here, you have to learn to do the engineering in the Airbus way," he said.
The Wichita facility was started with the long-term goal of developing the capability to manage and deliver a complete wing design package. The goal also is to provide technical leadership for Airbus' supply chain in the U.S.
Airbus spent more than $10 billion with several hundred suppliers and thousands of subcontractors in the U.S. in 2009, the company said.
Toulouse is the main engineering site. It also operates engineering centers in Mobile, Ala., India, China and Russia. The China and Russia facilities are joint ventures with local partners, Champion said.
Wichita's site works closely with Airbus' engineering center in Filton in the United Kingdom.
In the U.S., Airbus also operates a headquarters in Herndon, Va., a spares center in Ashburn, Va., and a training center in Miami. Including the Wichita and Mobile facilities, Airbus employs 800 people in the U.S.
Breaking the mold
Airbus got its roots as a consortium of aerospace companies. That background has led to some challenges for the Wichita facility.
For example, if Wichita engineers worked with a wing team in the United Kingdom, it was with a certain set of methods and tools, Champion said.
"If they worked for a French team or a German team, it was a different set of methods and tools," Champion said. "So it was sort of a nightmare."
Airbus became an integrated company in 2000 and is working toward one common system.
That's especially true on the new A350 program.
"It's going to be easier starting from the 350 to work for Airbus than it was before," Champion said.
Although Wichita primarily works on wings, it also is working closely with Spirit on the Airbus A350 center fuselage section and front spar on technical and program oversight.
"We've broken the mold a little bit to say we work on the A350 fuselages," O'Leary said.
In the future, Wichita engineers may become involved with Airbus military aircraft.
"We haven't gotten involved in the A400(m)," O'Leary said. "I have a feeling we're going to get broken into it."
The Wichita site prefers commercial work because it's easier. Military work involves dealing with International Traffic and Arms rules and other regulations controlling the import and export of defense-related products.
"We certainly know how to do military work," O'Leary said. "I think it will happen because we need the engineers."
How much Wichita grows will depend on how far Airbus needs to grow, Champion said.
In the meantime, Wichita remains an important piece of Airbus.
"Wichita is Airbus," Champion said.
Reach Molly McMillin at 316-269-6708 or mmcmillin@wichitaeagle.com.
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