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Hamburg: Airbus yesterday toned down expectations of an immediate solution to all the technical glitches which delayed its A380 superjumbo project, saying wiring problems had been solved for the first aircraft only.
A German news report last week said that Airbus had solved the wiring installation problems, which delayed A380 deliveries by an average two years and drove the planemaker into the red.
Aviation-watchers and some investors cheered the report, saying it closed the worst chapter in Airbus's 30-year history.
Gerhard Puttfarcken, head of Airbus's German operations, said Airbus had passed a key milestone in completing wiring for the first A380 to be delivered to Singapore Airlines in October and handling the transition to cabin installation.
But work was still going on to solve the long-term issues. Airbus expects to start building soon a common design platform between its main French and German plants. It said recently this would be operational from the 26th plane onwards.
"We are creating the conditions so that in future there will be one common platform from all the sites," Puttfarcken told visiting French journalists when asked to clarify the report. EADS unit Airbus has 16 sites including 7 in Germany.
Engineers found last year that wiring designed in Hamburg could not be fitted into A380s on the assembly line in Toulouse.
Experts blamed this on the failure of Airbus Hamburg to keep up with Toulouse by installing the latest 3D design software.
That in part reflected the four-nation planemaker's incomplete integration, according to a diagnosis carried out by outside industrialist Christian Streiff, who served briefly as Airbus CEO last year and launched its Power8 restructuring platform.
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