First Airbus plane parts set off for China

Jun 25 2008 by Bill Gleeson, Liverpool Daily Post

AIRBUS has started transporting the first aircraft segments to the new single-aisle assembly line in China.

But the company has said the new £650m Chinese factory will not divert work from Airbus’s factory at Broughton, near Chester, where production is being ramped up to help meet demand for the company’s best selling airliner.

The assembly line, near the Chinese port city of Tianjin, is the first outside Europe for the aerospace giant and is aimed at helping Airbus tap into the huge market for single- aisle airliners in China.

The assembly process of the first aircraft will start in August, with delivery of the jet scheduled for the first half of 2009. Six jigs loaded with parts for an A320 from Airbus production sites in Europe left Hamburg on a barge. It carries the forward and rear fuselage section, a pair of wings made at Broughton, the horizontal and vertical tailplane and engine pylons. The barge will transport the segments to the container terminal at Hamburg harbour, where they will be transferred onto a commercial container ship.

The Chinese final assembly line will mainly produce aircraft for the Chinese market, where Airbus expects passenger traffic to grow fivefold in the next 20 years, causing an estimated need for 2,670 new airliners worth more than £150bn.