With almost 2,500 Airbus A321neo to deliver in June 30, 2019, and customers waiting to receive them, the European manufacturer decided to launch a study for a A321neo assembly line in the Jean-Luc Lagardère site in Toulouse. At the moment, the facility is still dedicated to the A380 but the production will stop soon. Thus, Airbus has several square meters to use in Toulouse. Assembling the A321neo seems to be the obvious solution. So far, the model has only been assembled in Hamburg as part of old agreements when Airbus was not “a normal company” to use Tom Enders’s words. This is the opportunity for Airbus to accelerate the setup of a 4.0 assembly line only one model could experience: robot with seven axes dedicated to the fuselage’s automated drilling and autonomous mobile platforms.

The announcement of a new A321neo line pleases the union CFE-CGC which is confident about the study’s result and stresses “Jean-Luc Lagardère site has all the capacity needed as well as competitiveness to face this new challenge.”