Global aerospace majors Airbus SAS and Boeing are priming their captive engineering and research units in India for larger chunks of high-end aircraft development work, driven by the country?s large pool of engineering graduates and IT expertise. While engineering services outsourced to India typically involve computer-aided design, these units are focussed on areas such as simulation, analysis and virtual manufacturing which can help pare costs in the development of new aircraft by reducing physical testing cycles.
Airbus sees its engineering centre in Bangalore taking on more responsibility as it scales up its headcount to 400 over the next three years from 180 at present. The centre currently works on issues involved in the design phase of aircraft, systems simulation and integration testing.
?In the next 3-5 years, India will be doing some activities which will not be done anywhere else in the world,? said Eugen Welte, CEO of Airbus Engineering Centre India. ?Airbus wants to build here a kind of long term establishment and develop skills which can be done here from India and no other place elsewhere. That is the main focus.? For its competitor Boeing, the company?s research and technology centre in Bangalore is key to developing critical technologies for products of the future through various collaborations with research institutes such as the Indian Institute of Science and IT companies including Wipro and HCL.
?Our model is based on a collaborative approach which will expand significantly,? said Dinesh Keskar, president, Boeing India. ?This centre will also be tightly integrated into the technology communities of the Boing Company.?
The centre ? which works with more than 1,000 technologies across India on engineering, IT and advanced R&D projects for Boeing ? has high potential in innovative research in the areas of fundamental research in materials, networks and aerodynamics, he added. ?The demographics of advanced countries and their engineering graduate output is much lower than India can produce for the next several decades,? said Ajay Prabhu, chief operating officer at QuEST Global Inc, a Bangalore-based aerospace engineering services and manufacturing company. ?Engineering intensive industries such as this have to tap the talent market to continue to thrive in the business. Over time, the complexity and value addition of engineering done here will increase.? Pritam Bhavnani, president, Honeywell Aerospace India, agrees that the complexity of work done at the company?s India centres have increased over the years. In its new products like the Synthetic Vision System, which gives pilots a simulated visual view of the flight path and terrain, more than 50% of the development is done in India.
?Basically, the system is developed in modules so an entire module is given to the Indian team,? said Bhavnani. Earlier, the US project teams would hand-hold the local teams. ?There will be more of R&D work flown into India,? said John Siddharth, aerospace and defence analyst at consultancy firm Frost and Sullivan.