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Hot Topic: IFE Wiring, A380, and CATIA!

This story is about In-Flight Entertainment, at least eventually. It is about entertainment wiring on the A380, the systems that design the wiring, and the way computer aided tools help, or don’t help that job. I would also ask that readers please read the hyperlinked articles at the end of this story, all the while remembering that both Boeing and Airbus use many of the same sophisticated CAD/CAM design and collaboration tools. The big one in common usage is from a company in France of all places, called CATIA (sounds like it is spelled). Because it plays a big part in the development of planes from Boeing and Airbus, it is the focus of the billions of dollars in overruns and missed opportunities by the folks in Toulouse. It is not the problem per se, but rather the vehicle for the problem and if the stories in the links below are to be believed, it is the antithesis of “working together”! Lets’ start in the beginning...

In the late 80’s and early 90’s, Boeing spent vast sums and employed thousands of people in an attempt to integrate the management systems (CAD/CAM, Purchasing, Bill Of Materials [BOM], etc) that are necessary to support an airplane production program. Boeing had hundreds, if not thousands, of existing management “systems” that were developed over many years and were the key to producing a consistent product such that internal experts would know the status of any airplane on the assembly line or on the flight line. This is a daunting task today considering a modern commercial airliner may have over 1 million parts and the design, manufacturing, assembly and installation of each one was tied to some piece of paper (or many pieces of paper) and usually some type of system was in place to detail, track, make, coat, test, install, and store each one. As new computer aided design capability came along, each system had to be modified to interact with the digital output of computers…not pieces of paper. The computer aided design tools came along long after many were born and the task was to integrate them into the process of designing and building airplanes. Boeing sunk a ton of money in their primary design tool, CATIA, a French software product developed by Dassault Systems, and hosted on IBM workstations. Further, they spent big dollars to get their suppliers and all company stakeholders in lock step with the design tools. The fact that many suppliers did not speak English (in many cases) or were not located in Seattle caused many problems, but great efforts were made in a attempt to mitigate any miss-coordination or misunderstanding. Their goal was to produce a digital mockup of the B777 and then derive all the design, purchasing, manufacturing and assembly plans that fell out because of the design, digitally. It was useful that the design tools came first but here is the key, it made them without all that paperwork and then it had to talk to all those other systems. As it was, Boeing was able to roll out the B777 without at least one level of physical mockup and this meant less design costs and faster product development.

A lot has happened since then and this writer has little knowledge of the final airplane manufacturing process developed or the evolution of the systems in place today but the process is somewhat universal…technology will invade your best laid plans and you have to deal with it if you want to maintain profitability. At the time, Boeing was quite jealous of Airbus and they talked continually about advantage of a “green field” approach the new Airbus Company had – no relearning or rewiring old manufacturing systems to fit the new technology. It is also ironic that Airbus should fall into this trap because when the CATIA software first came into Boeing, the technocrats then bemoaned the potential knowledge that Airbus would glean from Boeing’s rigorous wringing out of the Dassault product. I guess it looks like another bug bit Airbus, at least from reading from the below links. New technology can be made to work with old systems but new technology can also generate new problems. It is beginning to look like Airbus lost configuration control (one of the top “musts” in airplane design) and the problems of designing and building airplanes in multiple places, with differing languages and different software compounded when the product neared rollout and taught a cruel lesson. Certainly one lesson that was painfully obvious to this writer after reading the Internet chatter is – hardware is easy, software is hard.

• http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/a380_delayed_by.html 
• http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/2006/07/disaster_storie_2.htm 
• http://www.aviationnow.com/avnow/news/channel_awst_story.jsp?id=news/aw072406p2.xml
• http://www.bennettmg.co.uk/News/news_airbus_catia.html
• http://aecnews.com/articles/2035.aspx 

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