Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Having Been Thoroughly Spanked for its DumboJet Mistakes, Airbus Regularly Submits to its New Dassault Systèmes Overlords

When Airbus went public in 2006 and confessed to its inability to deliver the A380 DumboJet on time, the repercussions were many. Executive heads rolled, the unions were pressured to put product first, and several airlines cut back their orders. The two big winners were Boeing and Dassault Systèmes.

Since then Airbus has placed several large orders for CATIA and related software tools. Today Dassault announces that Airbus has standardized on its Abaqus Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software, from Dassault's SIMULIA division.

To quote the press release, "This decision comes as a result of an extensive benchmark of several FEA codes. The Abaqus FEA software has already been successfully applied on the A380 aircraft program for structural virtual testing, and represents a first step in what is to develop into a longer-term collaborative relationship." That last phrase is marketing-speak for "we have both hands deeper into their pockets than you can possibly imagine."

The A380 design team knew they were in trouble when the wiring inside the aircraft started to look like a set from the movie "Aliens".

Posted by Randall at 11:15:46 | Permanent Link | Comments (5) |