Production Control in the Aircraft Industry

Abstract

Owing to the extremely high development costs and the limited national markets, new aircraft programmes in Europe today are now only executed in multinational cooperation. Usually, a work-sharing scheme is devised corresponding to the financial participation of the individual partners, with the result that design and production of the aircraft are spread over several countries. This is accentuated by subcontracting components to the industry of customer countries (offset transactions).

Professor Bernd Hirsch has university education in mechanical engineering and production engineering from the Rheno-Westphalian Technical University, Aachen (RWTU), West Germany (1965). He has a degreee from 1969 on automatic determination of machining data, considering particularly the computer-aided programming of NC- lathes. His professional experience covers a mechanical apprenticeship at Daimler-Benz AG (1957–1959), part-time assistant in the Dept. of Industrial Business Administration, RWTU, Aachen (1960–1963), and part-time assistant and after passing the final examination scientific assistant to Professor Dr.-Ing. Dr. H. C. H. Opitz at the Machine Tool Laboratory, RWTU, Aachen (1963–1969). He has carried out various aerospace production development and management functions at VFW-Fokker’s Bremen headquarters (1969–1979) and been Section Director for corporate production planning and control. During 1979–1981 he was team-leader of a Brazilian/German university project at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Fliranopolis S.C., Brazil. From 1982 to 1983 he was Head of the Central Production Development Dept. of MBB’s transport aircraft division in Hamburg and Bremen. Professor Hirsch is at present Director of the Bremer Institut für Betriebstechnik und angewandte Arbeitswissenschaft (BIBA).

Dr.-Ing. Gustav Humbert studied production engineering at the University of Hannover, West Germany. He has been assistant at Institut für Umformtechnik und Umformmaschinen at the University of Hannover, Visiting Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and since 1980 in the aircraft industry with Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm GmbH, Transport Aicraft Group where he is at present Director of data processing systems production.