By Tim Johnson, McClatchy Newspapers –
QUERETARO, Mexico — In one part of this central Mexico city, technicians overhaul commercial aircraft engines and landing gear. Across town, engineers assemble fuselages for one of the most modern business aircraft on earth, the Learjet 85.
Industrializing nations like Brazil and China get a lot of attention for their thriving aerospace sectors. But Mexico’s aerospace industry, too, has gone wheels up and taken flight, with a lot less world notice.
More than 260 aerospace companies now operate in Mexico, exporting some $4.3 billion in aircraft and parts last year. The Mexican government has set a target of $12 billion in such exports by 2020, a figure that would surpass aerospace exports from Brazil and Spain.
Major clusters of aerospace companies have settled in the Tijuana-Mexicali corridor along the U.S. border, in the city of Chihuahua in northwest Mexico, and surrounding this high desert hub in the geographical center of the country. Smaller clusters have formed in Monterrey in the northeast and in the port city of Guaymas on the Gulf of California in Sonora state.
Local officials are hoping that one day Queretaro (pronounced keh-REH-tah-roh) will be uttered in the same breath as aviation centers like Seattle and Wichita, Kan., in the United States, Montreal in Canada, and Toulouse in France.
Unlike other up-and-coming aerospace powers, Mexico neither supplies its own defense needs nor produces its own aircraft. But just about every component imaginable for jetliners and helicopters can be manufactured in Mexico today, including jet turbines and fuselages.
It’s only a matter of time before the nation may design its own aircraft, experts here say. Dreams already are taking shape.
In an office in the National Aeronautics University of Queretaro, Rector Jorge Gutierrez de Velasco leans back and reflects on Mexico’s aerospace achievements.
“History tells us that clusters take decades to take shape. Then as they develop, advancing along with Mexican engineering, development processes, educational and economic capacities and so forth, maybe we can talk about producing an Aztec Uno or a Huitzilopochtli,” Gutierrez said, reaching for possible names for an aircraft from his nation’s history prior to the Spanish conquest.
First off, though, he said the nation wants to see a new foreign aircraft, no matter the brand, take off with 50 percent of its components “Made in Mexico.”
Big U.S. companies with operations in Mexico include Hawker Beechcraft, Gulfstream Aerospace, General Electric, Textron and Honeywell. France’s Safran Group, Canada’s Bombardier Aerospace, Netherlands-based Fokker and Spain’s Aernnova, a major supplier to Airbus, Bombardier and Brazil’s Embraer, also have set up production in Mexico.
Some 30 foreign companies have operations in this city of 1.8 million people.
Mexico has an edge in human capital. On a per capita basis, it graduates three times more engineers than the United States. Some 30 percent of Mexico’s 745,000 university students are enrolled in engineering and technology fields, and 114,000 of them graduate yearly. Technicians, though, often have to be trained in-house in specialized processes even after receiving training elsewhere.
So far, industries with operations in Mexico have focused on assembly of aircraft structures, precision machining, overhauling engines and landing gear, laying out of electrical systems, and assembly of composite components.
“There are companies like Zodiac in Baja California that are putting together interiors of aircraft using composites,” said Manuel Sandoval Rios of ProMexico, a trade promotion agency. “We are moving into complex materials such as carbon.”
Currently, Mexico’s aerospace sector employs 31,000 workers. The goal is to have 110,000 jobs in aerospace by 2020, Sandoval said.
That compares with some 335,000 jobs in auto manufacturing and auto parts.
As the aerospace sector expands, authorities hope to expand the number of foreign and local companies that provide parts. Only a few Mexican companies now manufacture key components.
“The challenge now, just as it once was in the automotive sector, is to ramp up the supply chain and, when possible, develop national suppliers,” Sandoval said.
Authorities encourage Mexican companies to work with specialized metals, like titanium and molybdenum, and develop thermal coatings for aircraft parts.
In some cases, auto parts firms made a transition. One of those is Grupo Kuo of Mexico City, only three hours to the south of here.
“They make auto transmissions, and they did the design for the Corvette transmission. What we helped them do is create a specialized aerospace division … that has grown rapidly and supplies both Safran and Eaton,” Sandoval said.
