A Look Inside the Airbus Factory Revolutionizing the World of Airplanes

This communicative originally appeared connected WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

This is the astir important infinitesimal successful the beingness of an airliner: erstwhile the caller proprietor signs for it and picks it up, overmuch similar a operator picking up a caller car from a dealer.

The craft successful question is an Airbus A321neo, and it is parked astatine Hamburg-Finkenwerder, the German city’s 2nd airport, which Airbus uses for testing, logistics, and transportation of airplanes to customers. Gathered astir the level are pilots and compartment crew, arsenic good arsenic 2 executives from Wizz Air, the low-cost Hungarian hose that is astir to instrumentality transportation of it.

Airlines and manufacturers ne'er disclose however overmuch they wage for idiosyncratic aircraft—partly due to the fact that prices beryllium connected galore factors, including the fig of planes purchased and the commercialized past of each idiosyncratic airline—but buying a level is ne'er cheap. The basal terms of a azygous Airbus A321neo is estimated to beryllium astir $110 million.

This peculiar plane, registered by Wizz Air arsenic H9-WNM, was produced successful Airbus’s Hamburg mill successful conscionable implicit a year. The tract is 1 of the company’s 4 accumulation centers, the others being successful Toulouse, France; Mobile, Alabama; and Tianjin, China. Known arsenic last assembly lines (FAL), these elephantine workshops are wherever a plane’s structural parts, on-board electronics, hydraulic and mechanical components, and different pieces each travel together.

But earlier these components scope the FAL, they request to beryllium manufactured. Some are made internally by Airbus, others by 3rd parties, and unneurotic making them involves dozens of factories and centers astir the globe. Then determination is the formidable logistical situation of bringing them each together. This analyzable ballet involves shipments by boat, train, road, and air, with a tiny fleet of peculiar transport planes—known arsenic Belugas—playing a cardinal role. These aircraft, with their prodigious girth that makes them lucifer beluga whales, were created by Airbus to determination ample components specified arsenic fuselages from 1 accumulation halfway to another.