The pandemic caused Airbus to lose 40% of its civil aircraft activity almost overnight. This will not work without staff adjustments, explained Executive Chairman Guillaume Faury to The world.
Unions are angry and workers are worried about losing their jobs. With the restructuring of the entire economy engaged on the back of the coronavirus, the industry is adapting and leaving the old models before the health crisis. A general “reset” is being carried out on the backs of employees and travelers. Airbus has already built a commercial transporter model for the post-coronavirus crisis, which follows the alternative concept of planes that consume little fuel to follow aeronautical decay.
Guillaume Faury, 52, has been the CEO of Airbus for over a year. Instead of thinking of a new expansion of production as at the beginning, it must now slow down and reduce it. The aviation industry is facing the worst crisis in its history, officially due to the coronavirus pandemic, and travel that is found to be limited. 135,000 people are employed by Airbus worldwide. Airbus has ad end of June plans to cut about 15,000 jobs by summer 2021, a third of which will be in France, as part of a restructuring plan put in place to deal with the airline crisis caused by the epidemic to the new coronavirus. From suppliers to manufacturers and airlines, the survival of an entire industry is at stake. Airlines around the world are announcing job cuts or the implementation of new strategies. For example, Lufthansa, which presented a social plan, mentioned that the number of passengers in 2019 will probably not be reached before 2023. The group has declared June 10 must lay off 26,000 employees after negotiations between the unions UFO, Verdi and Vereinigung Cockpit.
A The world, CEO of Airbus valued that the return to normal, if there is not a second wave of coronavirus, should take place in 2025: “After market studies and discussions with the airlines, we assume that the previous volume will return ‘by 2025 at the latest. We expect demand for single-aisle aircraft to grow faster than for large-scale models. We therefore currently anticipate that the A320 family will gradually increase its production from 2022/2023. We expect low demand for wide-body aircraft over the next five years, as there was already excess supply on the market before the crisis. ” Already like the newspaper The echoes wrote in August 2019, before the coronavirus crisis, the policy was to move “in recent years” to choose “single-aisle planes, medium-sized aircraft that can carry 150 to 250 passengers who have made enough progress to no longer be in the shadow of wide-body aircraft such as the Airbus A350 or Boeing 787 ”. Does the health crisis allow industrialists to justify job losses?
Always at The world, Guillaume Faury states that “it is difficult to provide guarantees at the moment in a situation that could worsen. So far, we expect domestic air traffic to resume in summer and international traffic by the summer of next year. If there were a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic, with longer travel restrictions, the situation would be even worse. So I don’t want to make any promises ”. Astonishing statement on the part of the CEO of Airbus, because the French government has declared wanting to abolish domestic flights in France by the voice of Bruno Le Maire, Minister of the Economy, who request from the end of last April a drastic reduction in domestic flights as soon as a rail alternative of less than two and a half hours exists.
The CEO of Airbus evokes in the interview at The world a “structural change” because “production of minus 40% means that we will return to the level we were about 10 to 15 years ago” and “the fundamental question of structural change may arise later when we have more clarity on market developments. If the aviation industry will return to its previous growth trajectory in 2023. We are not here today ”. At the Singapore Air Show, which was held from February 11 to 16, 2020, Airbus unveiled its flying wing project: Maveric. Very early on, the aeronautical manufacturer set itself the objective of rethinking the plane in order to reduce its carbon footprint and Airbus wishes to fly a full-size model of the prototype which could see the light of day by 2035. The reduction in staff at the European aircraft manufacturer seems to announce, in fact, a planned restructuring well before the health crisis to set up a “carbonless” aviation under the pressure of new environmental directives. Moreover, government measures are insufficient for journalist Sébastien Porte, author of “The last plane: how air traffic destroys our environment” published on June 11.
Philippe Rosenthal
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Source : http://www.observateurcontinental.fr/?module=articles&action=view&id=1735
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