Airbus Venture Triggers Little Enthusiasm at U.S. Companies
An executive of Airbus Industrie said Thursday that the European airplane consortium is seeking to build airliners with an American partner at a U.S. plant, but the statement failed to evoke enthusiasm among U.S. aerospace company officials.
Airbus has been conducting talks with U.S. firms for several years to explore a possible joint venture or production agreement, but the talks have never gone beyond the exploratory stage, U.S. officials said.
Adam Brown, Airbus vice president for group strategy, told Reuters in an interview in Chicago that the company wants to set up an assembly line in the United States to increase production because of a backlog of orders for its A-320 jet passenger plane.
Although Brown did not mention names of specific companies, Lockheed was rumored to be a strong possibility for such a relationship, Reuters said.
John C. Brizendine, president of Lockheed’s aeronautical systems group, said in an interview with The Times last year that the company had been conducting very preliminary talks with Airbus for some time but that nothing substantive had resulted. A Lockheed spokesman said Thursday that there has been no change in that evaluation.
Similarly, a spokesman for Long Beach-based Douglas Aircraft said that company has been holding discussions with Airbus “for many years” on subjects including a possible joint production agreement on the Airbus A-340 or the Douglas MD-11.
Reduce Risk
“Those talks have covered a wide gamut of possibilities and the fact is that none of them have come to have any substance,” Douglas spokesman Don Hanson said. “There are continuing contacts from time to time.”
Hanson added, “I don’t think there is any new startling development.”
Airbus, a consortium of aerospace firms in France, West Germany, Britain and Spain, believes that component manufacturing and final assembly in the United States will help reduce its members’ risk to the declining dollar, the currency in which worldwide aircraft sales are priced, Brown told Reuters.
“We are looking at more than just a subcontractor, a tin bender. We’re looking at some kind of partnership for final assembly” of the planes, Brown said.
He said Airbus wants to exploit the winding down of production on assembly lines where U.S. military aircraft are made. Brown said Airbus has made a number of proposals to several U.S. firms.
The United States has been engaged in a long-simmering trade dispute with the European nations that finance Airbus. The Americans contend that massive European government subsidies to the consortium’s four member firms permit it to sell planes at money-losing low prices that unfairly rob sales from world leader Boeing Co. and McDonnell Douglas, parent of Douglas Aircraft.
Brown was in Chicago to address local business leaders as part of a U.S. tour aimed at telling Airbus’ side of the story. He contends that Boeing and McDonnell Douglas get indirect subsidies through military contracts from the Pentagon.
