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发帖数: 331 | 1 Japan's Progress in Aerospace: No Lost Decades Here
If you think you are well informed on high technology, here’s a question:
Which Japanese corporation, formerly a manufacturer of humble commodity
textiles, now ranks among the top ten players in the global aerospace
industry?
Give up? The answer is Toray Industries.
I tried this question at a gathering of U.S. executives in Tokyo recently.
It was an event put on by TTI/Vanguard of Santa Monica, a conference-
organizing firm discreetly famous for the quality of people it brings
together for its two-day think-ins on technology. I asked those with
specialist knowledge of either Japan or of the global aerospace industry to
hold their fire. No one else got the answer.
As for the American aerospace executives in the room, Toray needed no
introduction. Formerly in the rayon business, the company has in recent
decades established a global lock on the manufacture of aerospace-grade
carbon fiber. How important is this? Crucial. Carbon fiber is the coming
thing – perhaps the single most important innovation in the aircraft
business since World War II (as a transformative technology, it ranks up
there with radar and the jet engine, both originally developed in the early
1940s).
Carbon fiber boasts an almost uniquely high strength-to-weight ratio. This
makes it ideal for, among other things, aircraft wings. It has long been
used in military aircraft but now, thanks to Toray’s success in reducing
production costs, it is making the transition into civilian applications.
The most important civilian application so far has been in the new Boeing
787, the so-called Dreamliner. With the help of superlight carbon fiber
wings, Boeing has reduced the 787’s fuel cost per seat mile by about 20
percent. The wings are crafted in Japan by the Mitsubishi group using Toray-
made carbon fiber. Already there are rumors that Airbus is planning a plane
with similar wings, which will be similarly sourced from Toray and
Mitsubishi.
Carbon fiber illustrates a key criterion in high-tech manufacturing: quality
control. Although the process of making carbon fiber is hardly particularly
daunting, the real challenge is in delivering consistently high quality.
The quality control challenge is all the more important because defects in
carbon fiber are notoriously difficult to identify until it is too late.
The wider point here is that, contrary to all conventional wisdom in the
West, Japanese industry has not exactly been standing still in the last two
decades. That should be obvious from the fact that in 2010, the last year
before the earthquake, Japan boasted a current account surplus of $196
billion – up more than three-fold on 1989.
The ultimate problem is the American press whose negative reports on the
Japanese economy have left even the most sophisticated Americans in the dark
about the real Japan story: remarkably fast progress in advanced
manufacturing in the last two decades. While the press has focused on
largely illusory problems (e.g. Japan’s supposedly out-of-control
government debt), obvious success stories such as Japan’s rapid expansion
in aerospace have been swept under the carpet.
How well is Japan doing in aerospace? It turns out that Toray and Mitsubishi
are far from the only players. Panasonic and Kawasaki Heavy Industries are
also providing leading edge technologies. In the case of the Boeing 787,
dozens of Japanese contractors have played a crucial role and their
combined proportion of the plane’s total manufacturing content comes to 35
percent. That is up from just 20 percent in the case of the Boeing 777,
launched in 1995, and almost nothing in the Boeing 747, launched in 1969. |
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