Airbus CEO details broad post-crisis industrial hurdles

Aerospace is grappling with a slower-than-expected industrial recovery from the pandemic, with disruption spreading beyond its core supply chain and exposing fragile links with other sectors, the head of the world's largest planemaker said on Thursday. Airbus CE Guillaume Faury said the situation had also been aggravated by recent COVID restrictions leading to capacity closures in China, a major supplier. "There is an enormous problem in bringing the industrial supply chain back to strength worldwide, in the aviation world but not only in aviation," Faury told French journalists. "There is a lot of interdependence between the aerospace supply chain and electronic cards and components, raw materials and the availability of energy and skills at a worldwide level," Faury told the AJPAE French aerospace media association. "We see these problems spreading through the supply chain and what we, our suppliers and industrial partners ... imagined we could do at the start of the year when we built our production plans for 2022 - that didn't work out as expected." Faury was speaking broadly on behalf of French companies in his role as head of aerospace association GIFAS, but the comments shed further light on supply chain problems days after Airbus abandoned a delivery target and softened an output goal.<br/>