Airbus Aims to Boost Capacity, Quality with New Mobile Facility

Labeling the A320 family “the hottest-selling … in the industry,” Allan McArtor, chairman and CEO of Airbus Group Inc., says business in the airframer’s single-aisle arena is “disturbingly good” – so good that it faces a “huge backlog.”

Cutting that backlog – and improving quality – are key reasons Airbus opted to build a final assembly facility at Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley, the site of a former Air Force base. Airbus’ piece of the price is $600 million.

“We’ve got to get our capacity up,” says McArtor. “The Mobile assembly facility will allow us to increase our monthly rate on the [A320] family…significantly. It’s coming along exactly at the right time.”

Consider, as of August 2014 Airbus had booked firm orders for some 3,257 A320-family neos [new engine option] aircraft. That’s a significant slice of the 10,500-plus overall orders booked to date in a program first launched back in 1984.

Quantity drove Airbus to embrace the Gulf Coast. “We think it’s going to allow us to increase our market share in the U.S.,” says the man who oversees Airbus companies in the Americas. But the impetus for the move had more to it than that. “To be honest with you, we’re struggling with quality and on-time delivery in some of our European assembly facilities,” says McArtor. “We’re looking to Mobile to set a new standard for quality, and on-time deliveries.”

Construction of the facility is well underway on the shores of Mobile Bay. Plans are for assembly to begin in 2015, followed by delivery of Mobile-assembled aircraft in 2016. The goal is for four A320-family aircraft to roll off that assembly line per month by 2017.

That projection is predicated on the premise “that the supply chain can stay up” with demand says McArtor. In keeping with Airbus’ policy of spreading major component assembly (MCA) manufacturing among various countries, MCAs will be shipped to nearby docks abutting Mobile Bay – wings, fuselages, empennages, nose sections, and such. Then there are shipping containers packed with parts and engine pylons. The latter will be mated to the powerplants themselves close to the Brookley facility.

Slow, Measured Start-up

While the hot new A319, A320, and A321neos – with available fuel-efficient engine options of either Pratt & Whitney PW1100Gs or CFM LEAP1As – are dominating the order book just now, McArtor says Mobile will start out by producing traditional A320-family ceo, or current engine option, aircraft.

McArtor says Airbus is going that route “in order to make sure that the jigs and tools in Hamburg are mature for the neo … It’s not really a work force issue. It’s tooling. We don’t want to run the tooling for both ceo and neo” at the same time.

It appears the first craft off the Mobile line will be bound for nearby Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines. McArtor says the carrier recently increased its A320ceo order by 15 airplanes. “They’re to be delivered in 2017, and they want them out of Mobile.”

Plans are to finish the Delta order and then convert the line to an all-neo affair. McArtor thinks most of the subsequent aircraft will be the stretched A321 variant, and that they’ll sport fuel-saving ‘sharklet’ wingtips.

The 116-acre facility aims to be as efficient as possible, producing as many as 50 narrowbodies per year by 2018. One of the ways Airbus intends to do that is by eliminating a couple to station stops along the line says McArtor. The idea is to do “more precise, more efficient and high-quality work at each stop” along the final assembly line. Enabling that added quality, he says, is that “We’ll have better alignment tools available to us.”

The hoped-for result: the most efficient assembly process “in our entire global system,” asserts McArtor – this by virtue of incorporating lessons learned at other Airbus facilities.

Why Mobile?

Airbus has a history when it comes to Mobile. It was at Brookley that the airframer proposed to build its A330 tanker variant for the United States Air Force, a contract that ultimately went to Boeing. It thoroughly vetted Mobile’s proposal – geographically and demographically – before settling on Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley for the hoped-for tanker work. “We needed access to a deep-water port, as well as an airport,” says McArtor. The icing on the cake was that the seaport and airport were right next to one another.

After the tanker loss Airbus decided “not just to fold the tent” on future relationships with Mobile says McArtor. The idea was to “see what else we might be able to do” at the prime piece of Gulf Coast property. It took a year for the company to work up a business case for a single-aisle line at Brookley. The fact that the site would serve the largest single-aisle market on the planet, the United States, didn’t hurt. Nor did Mobile’s southern U.S. proximity to growing Latin American demand.

The Gulf Coast givith, and it taketh away – the latter often in spectacularly catastrophic fashion.

On September 12, 1979, Hurricane Frederic swept into normally placid Mobile Bay, producing winds in excess of 125 miles per hour and a storm surge of between 12 and 15 feet. Before it arrived, a half-million residents fled. By the time it departed billions of dollars in damage lay in its withering wake.

Airbus is not unaware of this. “Nothing’s hurricane-proof,” accedes McArtor. But, “We’re very comfortable with the fact that the facility and its infrastructure will be as solid as we can possibly make it.”

Airbus’ America’s chief believes the real risk lies less with the disruption the wind and tides wreak themselves as with what would happen with the work force.

Airbus intends to employ about 1,000 people at Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley. While McArtor insists, “the facility itself is very survivable,” he says worker access to Brookley, power supply and the infrastructure of the city itself in the wake of a hurricane could pose the biggest problems.

Such are the geographics. Demographically, Airbus is recruiting the lion’s share of its employees from the Gulf Coast. So far, competition has been keen. McArtor says there have been some 100 applicants for every job vacancy. “We were encouraged by the talent attracted to the automobile industry in Alabama.”

He contends, “The level of talent has been remarkable,” and not just when it comes to sheet metal folks. He notes that while some European Airbus people assumed highly skilled positions such as quality assurance engineer would have to go to European expatriates assigned to America, “To their surprise” they discovered the southeastern regional talent pool in the U.S. contains not just applicants of comparable talents, “but probably better talent than [Airbus has at its facilities] in Hamburg and Toulouse.”

Most of the Mobile jobs require experience, and that – so far – Airbus hasn’t had any problems in filling positions. Down the road it’s working with Alabama Industrial Training, or ADIT to keep the talent flow going. “They’ve created a training facility on-site [at Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley]. “It’s a beautiful facility for skills training,” says McArtor. “And they have a relationship with junior colleges and vocational/technical schools.”

Geography, demography, and an insistent demand for more airplanes. Allan McArtor and Airbus believe they auger well. “The [Mobile] program’s got legs,” he says. “It will be around for a long time.”