We'll update this post as the president spars with the press.8 10pm (EST): Is the president talking down the economy with negative talk and warnings that failure could lead to a permanent collapse?
THE wing spars designed for passenger jets at GKN's new aerospace works at Western Approach, near Bristol, are 27m long but must be accurate to within 0.3mm.
In 2009 GKN bought the Airbus wing factory at Filton, near Bristol.The firm hopes the new factory at Western Approach, an offshoot of the Filton works, will help it grasp a big share of the world market for carbon-fibre wing spars.
Others fear it might be a bureaucratic monster in the making, and that banks will be caught in the middle as it spars with other agencies.
Its muscle is in unlikely places like Western Approach, an anonymous industrial estate near Bristol, where GKN crafts wing spars for Airbus.
The high-tech bits of production, such as the making of carbon-fibre wing spars, could not speedily be replicated elsewhere.
Unlike any wing designed before, the DC-3 used an arrangement of metal boxes riveted together in place of the traditional ribs and spars.
In the first shed a robotic head layers carbon-fibre tape at prescribed angles, which determine the shape, strength and flexibility of the wing spars.
Airbus has over 550 orders for its new A350 XWB aircraft, with its all-composite wing spars made by GKN and a mainly British supply chain.
So even as he spars with his party over taxes and spending, Mr Koizumi's most important struggle apart from minding those embattled banks will be over whom to appoint as the central bank's next governor in March.
Yet they are one of the main spars of the government's energy policy.
