Airbus has confirmed plans to establish its first manufacturing facility in the US, the home market of its rival Boeing, which will be used to assemble and deliver single-aisle A320 aircraft.
Establishment of the new $600m facility at Brookley Aeroplex in Mobile, Alabama, is part of the company’s strategy to tap demand from customers in the US, while also increasing its global competitiveness.
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Airbus president and CEO Fabrice Brégier said that the time was right for Airbus to expand in America.
"The US is the largest single-aisle aircraft market in the world, with a projected need for 4,600 aircraft over the next 20 years," he said. "And this assembly line brings us closer to our customers."
Construction of the new facility to assemble the A319, A320 and A321 aircraft is expected to begin in the summer of 2013, with operations and initial deliveries starting in 2015 and 2016 respectively.
With a 20% share of the US single-aisle plane market, Airbus anticipates that the new US facility will begin delivering 40-50 aircraft a year by 2018.
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By GlobalDataAirbus believes that the new assembly line will serve as a platform to break Boeing’s domination of manufacturing large civil aircraft in North America. It currently has manufacturing facilities in Hamburg in Germany, Toulouse in France and Tianjin in China.
The company also expects to double the size of its Alabama facility over time, allowing it to add support services or passenger-to-freighter conversions.
In the US, Airbus already operates engineering centres in Mobile and Wichita, Kansas, for military customer services operation to support US Coast Guard aircraft; it also has an aircraft spares centre in Ashburn, Virginia, a training centre in Miami, Florida, and a regulatory and government liaison office in Washington, DC.
Image: Airbus’s first A320 jetliners production facility in the US will create around 1,000 jobs in the region. Photo: courtesy of Airbus.
