Issue 122: October 1996

Readers of our Australian Airpower series of books by Stewart Wilson on the major types operating with the ADF over the past 60 years will appreciate first hand the one time enormity of the Australian aircraft manufacturing industry which reached a peak during WW2 and even continued to hold its own for more than two decades after that conflict.

However, by the time the final Mirage was wheeled from the then GAF line in 1974 the writing was on the wall. The world was beginning to rapidly change and the aircraft being built everywhere were also destined to outlast their forebears by a magnitude of two or three. In retrospect, few of us could envisage that at the time and indeed it has only been in the last half decade or so, with the uninvited assistance of a massive international recession, that it has become clearly obvious that building aircraft, particularly military aircraft, is something that is now fiscally dubious.

The simple fact now is that combat aircraft are not replaced so quickly by competing technologies as they once were. They also last longer and the emphasis is now upon the combat system and the individual weapons they command as much as the specific aerodynamic qualities of the latest whiz-bang airframe. Let’s face it, a laser or GPS guided bomb is going to take out that bunker, hangar or fuel farm just as surely whether launched from an updated A-4 Skyhawk or F-5 as it will from a late model F-15E, Eurofighter or Su-27IB. Consequently when we assembled the final F/A-18 in 1990 it was apparent to any realist that this aircraft would probably still be in service in 2020. What will keep our Hornets (and F-111s and P-3s) at the forefront of their capabilities will be successive software, computing and weapons upgrades that bestow upon the launch platform mission capabilities not even envisaged when the aircraft was first designed.

And the same follows for the civil field. Recent advances in airliners largely revolve around reducing noise while ever more fuel efficient and reliable engines have evolved to ensure that your basic 737-300, MD-90 or A320 could well remain in service for anything up to half a century.

What I am slowly getting at here is that as far as the indigenous Australian aircraft industry goes, it has pretty much had it. Sad but true.

Mooted assembly programs include the Lead-in fighter, though that’s only for between 20 or 30 airframes. More Army helos, of some type in the next decade although this basic requirement has been around longer than Adam while the 16 Navy helos is hardly the deal of the century in terms of numbers and value. So what do we do?

Australia nowadays really has just two major aircraft manufacturing concerns — Hawker de Havilland and Boeing owned Aerospace Technologies of Australia. Both build various components principally for McDonnell Douglas Helicopters, Boeing and Airbus although lately each has had to buy into the various programs as risk sharing partners rather than the good ol’ days where they bid for work under the offset program of the seventies and eighties and won it if they were competitive. Nowadays you either come with money in your hand or don’t bother even bidding to build rudders and tailplanes for the 777 or undercarriage doors and such like for Airbus.

So, what’s the point of it all? After all, as taxpayers we all have subsidised the Australian aerospace industry to the tune of probably a billion dollars these past two decades just to ensure the “future” of an industry that to be honest hasn’t really survived. In that time more than a billion dollars was spent buying aircraft that were then assembled here using only a very small amount of local components. About the only real Australian content was the labour, even most of the raw metals and carbon fibre material was foreign sourced due to the exotic nature of its origins.

Remember the Wamira trainer project? That little honey was a total waste of around $100m! The people responsible for this debacle should have been taken out and shot for gross incompetence to say the very least, however in true military/bureaucratic style most would have been politely moved aside or promoted to another area and the whole thing forgotten. This made our acquisition of Pilatus PC-9s pretty expensive, considering also that we again paid a premium to have them locally assembled. As always, the hoped for export sales did not materialise and at the end of the day the unit cost of the CT-4/Macchi replacement ended up probably costing double what it should have if managed properly from the start with an off the shelf type being purchased.

The billions invested into the Hornet program to build up the industry, whilst laudable at the time, also essentially proved to be a waste of assets as all we do now, and are ever likely to do is to pay to join future Airbus and Boeing programs as very much sub partners of dubious fiscal return.

Nomad is another. Taxpayers lost hundreds of millions on this program over the decades and still pay today with a large number of Army surplus machines that we have the audacity to try and sell to our ‘allies’ as great aircraft when we won’t even fly them ourselves! Black Hawk and Seahawk could also have been purchased off the shelf from Sikorsky for about a third less while their local assembly did nothing to enhance our industry in the longer term. If acquired direct from Sikorsky, Army could have had 50 or so Black Hawks instead of just 39. That’s the sort of premium you have to pay to assemble them locally, and for what real gain?

So, in 1996 that’s what we have to show for the billions invested in our aircraft manufacturing industry these past few decades. And that’s why, like many people, I am incredulous that bankrupt Russia can get together sufficient funding to make a bid for the significant assets of Fokker. If accepted, and it looks like it will be, a Yakovlev backed consortium will pick up the Dutch manufacturer for something in the region of just $270m! That buys them an order backlog of $2bn covering around 60 to 70 aircraft.

Now let’s use some real lateral thinking. Let’s imagine, just for one moment, that ASTA and HdH got together and raised that amount of capital as a joint effort and began building the Fokker 50, 70, and 100 at Avalon, Fisherman’s Bend and Bankstown. Components and structures could come out of the two latter facilities while final assembly and test flying could be undertaken at Avalon. Something in the order of 4000 to 6000 jobs would be created and Australia would be building the fabled 100 seater that so many of our northern neighbours are clamouring to invest billions in reinventing.

Of course it will never happen, but I thought I would just share with you my brief dream of what a real Australian aircraft industry could look like for the twenty first century if we could just get our act together on something that might prove viable at the end of the day.

After all, if you can’t make a profit on buying someone else’s two billion dollar order book for an eighth of that value then you would have to be a pretty poor business person.