During its FY23 results call, Airbus confirmed the ramp-up of its aircraft production. The aircraft manufacturer aims to deliver around 800 commercial aircraft to customers in 2024, an increase of 65 from 2023.
2026 promises to be a key year for Airbus to hit its A320 and A220 production targets.
Whilst its A320 family aircraft programme will see the “lion’s share” of the ramp-up, Airbus’s CEO Guillaume Faury confirmed its A220 programme is also “dominating in terms of acceleration” and remains on track towards its target.
The smaller single-aisle variant ramp-up will continue towards a monthly production rate of 14 aircraft by 2026. Likewise, the A320 family is progressing towards its intended target of 75 aircraft a month by 2026.
Further increases in A320 production are not to be expected, Faury also confirmed, with the OEM focusing its efforts to reach a rate of 75 and stay on the number “for a while”.
Safety and supply chain concerns
While Faury noted the risks associated with accelerating production amidst supply chain difficulties, he added that this risk was one distributed across all its products and that suppliers would be monitored for their efforts to effectively serve the production increase.
Moreover, while supply chain issues linger across the industry as a whole, this did not deter the CEO’s confidence that Airbus would remain on target to hit its intended delivery and production targets.
“The supply chain is a world of bottlenecks,” he said in response to a Bloomberg journalist. “[Airbus is] trying to find the right ‘sweet spot’ between strong demand […] and the many bottlenecks.”
Faury also emphasised the importance of safety when pressed by reporters about worries that the production ramp-up could be seen as pushing quantity over quality.
“It cannot be quantity over quality. [We] don’t want to deliver a number of planes; we want to deliver a number of planes that are high quality and safe,” he responded.
“We cannot do quantity at the detriment of quality. We deliver on quality and safety. If we fail on this, we have to go back to the drawing board.”
Image credit: Airbus
