Airbus to develop Gaia-X data space

Aerospace giant Airbus is aiming to move all of its data-sharing capabilities to a Gaia-X data space. The company announced its plans at the Gaia-X Summit 2024 in Helsinki, Finland, explaining that it hopes to increase transparency with its massive network of suppliers.

According to Catherine Jestin, executive vice president of digital at Airbus and chairperson of the board at Gaia-X, the company aims to establish an aerospace "data space" by 2026, through which it will "facilitate the exchange of the data between all components in the ecosystem." 

"The backlog of Airbus is more than 8,000 planes, so we have 10 years of production ahead of us," Jestin said. "We are in a very privileged position but it [a data space] will also allow us to provide that transparency to all the companies that will contribute to the production of these aircraft in the future, to get them prepared, to get the funding and the human resources needed to be able to fulfill creating the aircraft at the end."

Airbus currently has the ability to share data with its "Tier 1" suppliers, OEMs, and contractors, of which Jestin estimates there are somewhere between 100-200, but does not have the same ability with thousands of other companies it works with.

"If you look at the supply chain of members, it's roughly 10,000 suppliers," she said. "The value of an aircraft is actually 80 percent delivered by the supply chain, so we [Airbus] are actually the last 20 percent - the final assembly. An aircraft has between two and four million parts that need to be produced and assembled in component assembly, then in major components as in the aircraft. It takes two years to go from the elementary parts to become a plane.