"Gosh, that's a question!” Sue Partridge stops to ponder the biggest change she has seen in the aerospace industry since she joined Airbus almost 35 years ago.
“I think engineering; Airbus and here in Filton is a much more inclusive place. We are much more flexible in the way we can work, which makes us more inclusive. We value difference, we look for difference and we see diversity as a real asset, so I think that is a huge difference from when I started when it was quite an old fashioned place, to be honest.”
Like this story? Why not sign up to get the latest South West business news straight to your inbox.
When she joined Airbus as an apprentice in 1989, Ms Partridge was the only woman out of a cohort of 100 new starters. She now heads up the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer's site in Filton, South Gloucestershire, where around 2,700 people work.
This year Airbus announced a record intake of interns, graduates and apprentices at Filton, with a total of 241 early career workers joining over the summer - the highest intake of early career starters in the UK the company has seen in 10 years. Ms Partridge estimates that around 20% of the latest early careers intake are women, substantially more than the 1% she represented three decades ago.
“There has been progress, not just in gender diversity but in the recognition that diversity overall is absolutely crucial for any business, and the value of diversity on any team, and of making Airbus a place where whoever you are or your background, you can feel comfortable in coming to work and totally included.
“None of those conversations were even mentioned back in 1989, you can imagine! We have made massive progress but there is still more to do, because 20% is better than 1%, but it's still not 50% is it? So there is still this huge, untapped talent pool out there."
According to figures quoted by the Royal Academy of Engineering in October 2020, only 9% of engineers in the UK are from Black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds, despite 27% of first degree qualifiers in engineering being from these groups. Meanwhile, research from industry body EngineeringUK published last year found 16.5% of the national engineering workforce is female.
Within Bristol’s key engineering sector, efforts are underway to address the imbalance. The University of the West of England (UWE) officially opened it s multi-million pound School of Engineering building at its Frenchay campus back in 2021, with a commitment to help increase the number of women and people from underrepresented groups working in the sector.
Airbus’ neighbour in Filton Rolls-Royce has been among the firms to attend careers events held in the city over the past few years by inclusivity groups, such as EqualEngineers, which has an ambition for 100,000 engineering and tech jobs to be created for people from diverse backgrounds by 2025.
Airbus has itself opened a STEM academy for young people in Filton this year as part of its education outreach, with a view to give schoolchildren an understanding of what it is like to work within aerospace. Ms Partridge admits that when it comes to encouraging more people from underrepresented backgrounds into engineering careers, "it's really complicated”.
“Young people are influenced at a very early stage, maybe even at primary school stage, a lot of focus has been made on secondary school age and older teenagers, but I think girls may be focusing on what they do or don't want to be earlier than that. We do a lot in Airbus, school liaisons, and I think it is incredibly powerful.
“We get our early careers to be the ones who go into schools so it's our young people who are talking to the next generation rather than older people like me, to try and make it more accessible. Role models are incredibly important, everybody when they are choosing a path in life is going to look around them and look up to other people. That doesn't mean to say for girls all the role models have to be women, but of course, it helps to see somebody that looks like you, doesn't it?
“In terms of other underrepresented groups, there are a lot of other dimensions to this which are really important, things like social inclusion, for some families and children in more socially deprived groups, they wouldn't even have any access to understanding what an apprenticeship was, let alone thinking it was something for them. So, we just have to keep chipping away and really working on it on all those fronts really."
Ms Partridge started her career with Airbus on the shop floor, where says she “really got my hands dirty”, and gained an understanding for how the decisions and actions of engineers affect the aircraft and the way it is made - an experience she says, has stayed with her throughout her whole career.
After completing her five-year apprenticeship, Ms Partridge joined the engineering team and was given some leadership responsibility early on, overseeing teams servicing Airbus’ A320 planes and developing new variants of aircraft.
She later led the team that designed the wings for the very first A380 planes for three years, from design of the wing boxes through to the first set of wings coming out of jig in Airbus’ factory in Broughton, North Wales. Ms Partridge described this as “the biggest role I did in that phase of my career”.
After returning from maternity leave, Ms Partridge moved into more of a programme management role, leading teams to deliver all of the industrial system and components needed for new aircraft, including the A320 Neo and the A330 Neo wings, and bringing together all of the different parts of Airbus’ operations in Filton and Broughton.
In 2017, Ms Partridge was asked to set up and lead Airbus' Wing of Tomorrow programme, which is developing a prototype 'eco-wing' designed to boost a plane’s fuel efficiency and reduce the amount of CO2 it burns in flight, as part of wider efforts to boost the sustainability of aviation. She took on the additional role of head of the Filton site in 2022.
Reflecting on her first full year leading the Filton site, where a new wing technology hub was officially opened back in July, Ms Partridge said Airbus had put the damaging impact of the Covid-19 pandemic behind it, as it ramped up production to meet renewed demand from airlines. Airbus’ order book backlog amounted to almost 8,000 planes at the end of September.
In November, bosses at the global firm said they were expecting the company to deliver a total of 720 commercial aircraft this year, and adjusted EBIT of £5.2bn - which would reflect a rise from the £4.9bn made in its previous financial year - when it delivered 661 commercial aircraft.
Ms Partridge said: “Every time we deliver another aircraft we are making a contribution, because the aircraft we deliver today are more efficient than the previous generation, that's really positive and challenging, because supply chains are quite disrupted at the moment because of the aftermath of the pandemic, but also the impact of the instability globally, in particular the Russia-Ukraine war. So a massively challenging year, but very positive.”
As well as its almost 250 early careers starters, more than 150 other direct recruits have joined Airbus’ Filton site as well, with Airbus planning to hire an additional 1,100 people across more than 25 sites in the UK.
Looking ahead to 2024, Ms Partridge said Airbus’ fuel engineering team in Filton would continue its work on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), with the company hoping all of its aircraft will be able to fly on 100% SAF by 2030.
She added that the company would also progress with the development of its hydrogen fuel system. Airbus will establish a new research hub in Filton in the future to develop hydrogen technologies and support its ambition to develop the world's first zero-emission commercial aircraft by 2035. Next year will also see testing get underway in Filton’s Air Tech facility on a full scale wing demonstrator made as part of the Wing of Tomorrow programme.
Ms Partridge said: “When we're look at recruiting, particularly when we are recruiting young people, working in an industry like ours, which is really visibly, really trying to decarbonise and doing some really exciting things to decarbonise, is actually really motivating for young people in particular, and they want to come and work in the industry in order to help to do that.”
The head of Airbus’ Filton site said the majority of workers there would continue to support the delivery and flight of the manufacturer’s existing aircraft and fleet, with “a lot to do” in 2024.
"Remember, our order backlog in Airbus commercial is 8,000 aircraft", Ms Partridge said, adding: "So we need to ramp up as fast as we can and obviously, given that we make the wings in the UK, no Airbus is going to be delivered to a customer without us making our contribution. So, across Airbus, we are very much in a growth trajectory at the moment and Filton is right in the middle of that."
