The Airbus $6 Billion Software Mistake
March 16, 2007 – 7:41 amYes, that’s Billion with a “B”.
I was reading the Feb 2007 Baseline Magazine article about product life-cycle management and how an incompatibility between two different versions of software was discovered during the manufacturing process of the latest Airbus plane, the A380. In summary, some of the parts were created in v4 and some in v5 of their computer-aided design (CAD) software, and the parts didn’t fit together.
The 2 year delay of the launch and the resulting costs were going to cost Airbus about $6 billion in lost profits.
In the world of commercial airline manufacturing, Boeing and Airbus are two of the biggest players. A typical Airbus A380 lists for $295 million and a Boeing 787 for a cool $122 million. As you can imagine, theres more than a handful of parts that go into an airplane, so by the time that the Airbus crew was putting the planes together, it was a little too late to make any quick changes.
Airbus has 41,000 people dispersed across 4 countries working on the project. According to the article, it takes 6 months to a year for a user to learn the differences between version 4 and 5 of Catia, the 3D computer-aided design software that was used. Throw that on top of redesigning and re-manufacturing the parts of the plane that were affected, and you can start to see the magnitude of the issue.
So, what can we take away from this?
Communication in aerospace engineering is just as important as any other business. Surprise, surprise.
If you’re interested, check out the full Baseline Magazine article.
Technorati Tags: software, aerospace, engineering, CAD, communication, Airbus, Boeing, product life-cycle management
3 Responses to “The Airbus $6 Billion Software Mistake”
I don’t know which is more egregious: The fact that people were designing using two different versions of software or the fact that a version update would take an aerospace engineer 6 months to a year to master.
By Anthony J. Davis, D.C. on Mar 16, 2007
from the article: “In 2003, the British National Audit Office, which scrutinizes public spending on behalf of Britain’s Parliament, pointed to difficulties in implementing CAD software used on the country’s Astute nuclear submarine project as a chief source of the program’s $1.7 billion in cost overruns. The chief contractor on the project, BAE Systems, said it underestimated the complexity of training users and the amount of information that the 3D design software would need to manage on the project. The Astute program is now four years behind schedule, according to the audit office.”
so yeah, this is rocket science, so to speak.
By Dustin Jacobsen on Mar 16, 2007