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European aerospace companies are merging and moving towards a single corporate entity. The recent acquisition by BAe of 35% of SAAB and the rumours that BAe and Dassault are about to merge testify to that.The European Airbus is now a real competitor to Boeing aircraft. Cost savings achieved by the use of supercomputers, and the integration of all design functions and production using a virtual enterprise model, will determine whether European companies consolidate their position in the market. The even more demanding military aircraft such as the strikefighter, a possible successor to the Eurofighter, require even closer integration of design teams and resources. The white-heat competition between Boeing and Airbus is putting enormous pressure on both companies to cut costs. As 80% of costs are fixed by the preliminary design chosen, it is important to cut costs at the margin. Today the building of the Airbus involves more than 50 thousand people across Europe. The design teams are merging their work sharing designs and risks whilst people are working in different countries. For example, the BAe buy into SAAB has doubled the staff available for simulations in electromagnetics. In the USA too, companies such as, Lockheed Martin, Grunnma and Boeing are merging to reduce costs and enhance competitive capabilities. The dream in Europe, is for the virtual designed aircraft to be a realistic one. For example, there is a drive to reduce design times for the aircraft wing, from 2 years to 3 months; but to achieve this, it requires a ten times improvement in human efficiency. For this to happen, high performance supercomputing needs to move centre stage and become a critical and essential element in the design process. In fact the aerospace industry has benefited enormously from using vector supercomputers and is one of the industries which provides the financial impetus for sustaining the development of shared memory vector machines, such as the SGI/Cray T90 and the NEC SX series. It is instructive to note that in the last ten years European aerospace companies were using Cray shared memory vector systems, but with the uncertainty of a successor product from SGI/Cray they have recently started to buy NEC SX series systems to maintain their mission critical computation. Airspace research centres such as NLR in the Netherlands, ONERA in France and DLR in Germany are using NEC SX-4 systems whilst waiting delivery of the new NEC SX-5, sometime in 1999. The SX-5 with its vector/parallel architecture and large shared memory, is expected to provide extra computing power, in an easy to use fashion, to enable the engineer to achieve efficiencies in design, and gain a competitive edge. As Dr. W. Loeve , head of informatics division at NLR put it: "The 8 processor NEC SX-5 with 64 GBytes of memory will relax memory limitations and at the same time remove the necessity of difficult programming needed by parallel distributed systems". This message was repeated by Dr. Francois Mescan, from ONERA, France, who also chose to buy an NEC SX-5 system. In most high technology industries the margin between success and failure is very narrow. In the past three decades very few commercial aircraft were successful to make their manufacturer profit. The Boeing aircraft and the European Airbus are notable exemptions. The economics of aircraft operation are such that even a small improvement in efficiency can translate into substantial savings in operating costs. Therefore, the operating efficiency of an aeroplane is a major attraction to potential buyers. This provides aircraft manufacturers with a compelling incentive to design the most efficient operating aircraft. The recent announcement by Boeing of plans to shed 20 to 50 thousand staff in the next two years, was probably triggered by British Airways choosing to replace its present Boeing aircraft fleet with Airbus, and reflects the tenuous profitability of the industry.
Chris Lazou
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