Neil Scott, Airbus UK engineering director

Every civil Airbus in the air is flying on wings that were made in the UK — at the company’s huge Broughton facility, to be precise. It’s one of the major factors that has earned the UK’s aerospace industry second position in the world, behind the US and ahead of France and Germany, a fact that probably escapes the majority of the general public.

Maintaining that position is, naturally, very important to those in the sector, and Airbus’s UK division is among a group of aerospace companies that is supporting a bursary for students to study for an Aerospace Engineering MSc at a variety of British universities. The bursary fund, totalling £6m, is being put up by BIS and other firms in the sector, including Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and MBDA.

But according to Airbus UK engineering director Neil Scott, this is just a matter of a place in a league table. ‘We want to hold our competitive edge, but to do that, we need to continually develop our capability in engineering, because that is absolutely central to everything we do.’