Airbus seeks technical experts

Planemaker concerned about finding engineers with experience in niche areas of expertise

Toulouse: Airbus SAS, which plans to hire 4,000 people this year, said it’s now more concerned about attracting the technical experts to design next-generation aircraft than losing talent to higher-paid banking jobs.

“What we miss is people who have enough knowledge of new technologies in order to help us integrate them on board aircraft,” Charles Champion, Airbus’ executive vice president for engineering, said in an interview. “We are not in a critical mode today, but if we do not engage the next generation of students, we might have a problem.”

That’s a change in emphasis for the Toulouse-based company, the world’s biggest maker of passenger jets. For years, management at Airbus and its parent European Aeronautic, Defence & Space Co. (EADS) have been concerned about engineering graduates abandoning aerospace careers in favor of higher paying jobs in the financial services industry.

Airbus’ most immediate concern is finding engineers with several years of experience in niche areas of expertise such as composites, Champion said. Composites represent an increasing share of aircraft structures, with more than 50 per cent of Airbus’ newest aircraft, the A350 twin-widebody, made of plastic.

Airbus is keeping up its push to interest students in aerospace, even though there are fewer engineers heading into finance, Champion said at an event outlining a concept for future air travel.

Recruitment drive

Airbus, with assembly lines in Toulouse, Hamburg and Tianjin, China, has been recruiting thousands of engineers and other employees in recent years as it ramps up production of single-aisle and widebody planes. Last year, Airbus hired 4,500 people. Half of this year’s intake had been achieved by mid-July, according to human resources director Thierry Baril.

In the US alone, where a new assembly line will begin delivering planes from 2016, Airbus and EADS expect to hire 1,000 people in the next five years. About a third of those will be destined for the planemaker.

Another area of focus is finding skilled electrical engineers. Airbus and Boeing are moving to aircraft using more sophisticated information technology and relying increasingly on electrically driven subsystems to save weight and reduce fuel burn.

“For more electric aircraft, we need to attract very good electrical engineers that would rather go to other types of industries rather than aviation,” Champion said. “We want to attract the talent on technologies that we will need in the future for the next generation of aircraft.”