India to be key R&D centre for Airbus A350 XWB

New Delhi: India will be one of the key centres for design and development of the A350 aircraft, European aircraft manufacturer Airbus’ answer to the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
Designing work for the A350 is the next project for the Airbus Engineering Centre India (AECI), the company’s high-tech aircraft component manufacturing facility in Bangalore, which started functioning in April last year.
“The A350 is the next big project for us. The engineers at the facility are currently working on the development of tools to design the aircraft,” said Kiran Rao, president, Airbus India.
Rao said Airbus was recruiting engineers for the work every month. The Centre has 35 engineers and the number is supposed to grow to 300 in the next four years. The A350 XWB (Xtra Wide Body), the new and improved version of the A350, has been built to take on the Boeing 777 family and some of the models of the Boeing 787.
Airbus has been looking at various ways to use India for both component manufacture as well as leverage its research and development potential. The first manufacturing agreement was with Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) in 1998 to make doors for the A320.
Earlier, Airbus had outsourced its engineering projects to other Indian companies like Infosys, which participated in the designing of the A380s, HCL and other companies like CADES, Satyam and Quest.
04/09/08 Surajeet Das Gupta & Anirban Chowdhury/Business Standard

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Categories: Foreign Sep 2008, New Sep 2008