Going green, staying lean

Dr Neil Calder hears the views of the ADS Group's deputy CEO and managing director of aerospace, Graham Chisnall and how environmental and sustainability drivers fit with a top level industry perspective. Increasingly, environmental and sustainability drivers provide the framework within which we live our lives and operate our businesses. Naturally, the aerospace supply chain is not immune to this.
The process and operating environmental improvements that individual factories and manufacturing entities are pursuing are a given these days. ‘Leaning out' manufacturing operations, getting increasingly efficient and eliminating waste, in materials or water use, energy or so on is something which is embedded into the current aerospace manufacturing sector. The whole lean process of reducing various forms of waste has a knock on consequence of addressing environmental issues. Location, location There has been a cycle of opening up state of the art new facilities on the back of some major new programmes like the Airbus A350 where the approach to environmental responsibilities is very evident. These are very impressive facilities from an environmental perspective as well as from a product and manufacturing technology point of view. New facilities are designed to be as carbon neutral as possible, with capabilities like water-based paint systems, and solar panels that power much of the electricity demands of the facility.  On the product side, it is self-evident that the need to produce increasingly efficient aeroplanes goes hand-in-hand with aircraft dramatically improving their environmental operations performance. Each generation of aircraft on a seat mile basis has been consuming 10-15% less fuel: arguably a record beyond any other part of the transport sector. The technologies being worked on by the industry could deliver step gains for the next single aisle aircraft of something like 30% or better, so revolutionary rather than evolutionary steps which would involve aircraft configuration, materials, new complex highly innovative aerodynamics, and new propulsion systems. These might not look like conventional airliners with tube and wings.  This is said every time we are at this stage of a new programme cycle, but this time round it might actually prove to be correct. The EU published the Horizon 2050 plan for the whole transport sector for the next 40 years, containing a set of re-stated aviation targets on emissions which are significantly more stringent than in previous strategies. A CO₂ roadmap just published by the Sustainable Aviation Group which is affiliated to ADS shows how we are going to grow in terms of passenger carriers whilst not seeing CO₂ emissions exceed 2005 levels. This is a very significant picture because once it's published as the CO₂ roadmap for an entire sector it's likely to be used by everybody.  Legislation across the nation The impact on the supply chain will be very significant: clearly the customers of the individual supply chain entities are going to have to drive the operational environment and performance of suppliers to the same degree as they are driving themselves, so all those lean and environmental best practices, such as ISO14000 and REACH legislation, have got to be insisted on throughout the supply chain to be meaningful. Factors like REACH are being taken extremely seriously, partly because it has some unintended selective and potentially quite serious consequences for aerospace. In achieving these exceptional levels of efficiency which the industry is working towards, it becomes very much a high technology game, and that has implications as you go down the supply chain for the ability of SMEs to be able to invest in the basic technologies and in the advanced manufacturing processes to be able to stay in that game. There is an aspect of the aerospace sector which allows for longer-term returns on those environmental investments. The longevity of aircraft programmes doesn't help things like fixed assets which are governed by standard accounting practices, but technology investment that's centred on the product can benefit from these longer term timescales if you have a balance sheet which can stand the early cash deficit. A beneficial effect of all this is that the sheer competitive drive to reduce the fuel burn of aircraft places a premium on technology that few other sectors can tolerate, so if you have or can develop the technology, it's always worthwhile investing in it. You've got a fairly high security of return in that if it's your technology that's on the aeroplane, then the switching cost of moving to anything else is prohibitive. I think competitive market pressure to produce increasingly fuel-efficient aeroplanes continues to dominate, more than legislative demands, and this will continue as oil prices rise. Noise hasn't figured much over the last 20 years: this period has been dominated mainly by CO₂ and NO_x concerns. These aren't going to go away, but noise is likely to come back up the political agenda and will probably end up influencing quite a lot of technology choices over the next 20 years. The re-engined A320s and B737s are significantly quieter than their existing platforms and probably set the benchmark for noise which society is seeking to reduce further with new aeroplanes. We may reach a situation with the next generation of aircraft where open rotors for example might offer substantial fuel efficiency gains but struggle to meet the noise benchmark now being set by the A320neo.  How society trades off noise against emissions reductions is a very immature science. Locked in growth However, what we've got is a very robust, sustainable sector, capable of huge change as evidenced by the crossover of metal to composite airliners, and the profound effect that has had on the manufacturing skills and asset base. I think it's a sector which has locked in growth because there's something completely connected between growing wealth in the world and people's desire to travel. We intend to maintain the political permission to grow by generating technology which will develop ever more efficient vehicles and I think we can see our way to achieving this, and that the UK is in an extremely strong position. In wings and engines, we produce some of the hardest, most difficult and influential parts of the aircraft in terms of its overall efficiency and its emissions. The fact we've got the Aerospace Growth Partnership (AGP) process going on with government is intended to maintain that pre-eminent position for the next 20 years and beyond, so I'm very optimistic about the UK's role in delivering ever more efficient aeroplanes. The AGP is a sustainable growth partnership, intended to not just sustain the sector we've currently got but if anything to secure even higher growth for it. www.adsgroup.org.uk