Airbus has begun full production of the A220 passenger jet at its Mobile manufacturing campus, marking the start of a second commercial aircraft line at the Brookley Aeroplex and adding roughly 400 jobs to the region’s aerospace workforce.
The first crew of Mobile-based A220 production workers clocked in this week after returning from an extended stretch of hands-on training at Airbus’ A220 final assembly line in Mirabel, Quebec, Canada, where the program originated.
Those employees are now applying that training to the earliest A220 units built on U.S. soil, working for now inside existing A320 family buildings and newly constructed support hangars while the dedicated A220 flowline hangar nears completion.
The startup follows the sequence Airbus used for its first Mobile line: train the workforce at the program’s origin, begin production in borrowed space, then move into purpose-built hangars as they are finished. The approach let the 400 new hires start producing airplanes years ahead of the construction schedule that will eventually give them their own building.
How Mobile became a two-line plant
Airbus first announced plans to bring A220 production to Mobile in October 2017, and ground was broken on the new flowline hangar and supporting structures at the Brookley site earlier this year. The buildout represents the latest expansion of Airbus’ Mobile footprint, which already assembles A320 family aircraft and has grown steadily since the company opened its first U.S. final assembly line there in 2015.
The 2017 announcement followed Airbus’ acquisition of a majority stake in the A220 program — the former Bombardier C Series, designed in Canada and already in service — which gave the European manufacturer a single-aisle jet in the 100-to-150-seat range that its own catalog lacked. Moving final assembly to Alabama put the jet on the same campus as the A320 family, the larger single-aisle workhorse that Mobile has been assembling since the first Alabama-built aircraft rolled out in 2016.
The choice of Mobile completed a transformation of the Brookley site. The Aeroplex occupies the former Brookley Air Force Base, whose closure in the 1960s cost the region thousands of jobs; for decades afterward, the field’s hangars hosted aerospace repair and supply firms with no single anchor tenant. Airbus’ arrival inverted that picture, and the A220 line makes the site the only place in the country where one manufacturer runs two commercial aircraft assembly lines side by side.
What the executives said
“The expansion of our commercial aircraft production in Mobile to a second product line, with 400 additional jobs to support it, further solidifies Airbus’ standing as a truly global aircraft manufacturer, and confirms without a doubt that Airbus is an important part of America’s manufacturing landscape,” said C. Jeffrey Knittel, chairman and CEO of Airbus Americas. “With Mobile, and our production network in Asia, Canada and Europe, we have strategically created a worldwide industrial base to better serve our customers.”
Paul Gaskell, president of Airbus U.S. A220, Inc., said the milestone caps months of preparation by the Mobile workforce.
“It’s exciting to see the start of production on the A220 in Mobile,” Gaskell said. “The production team has been training alongside their colleagues in Mirabel, and have returned ready to put their knowledge to work. We look forward to all of the milestones along the way to a successful delivery to the customer next year.”
The first delivery, and the pace after it
The first A220 built in Mobile, an A220-300 model, is bound for Delta Air Lines and is scheduled for delivery in the third quarter of 2020.
Delta’s order gave the Alabama line its launch customer — the Atlanta-based carrier is the largest U.S. operator of the type, and its Southeastern network made a Mobile-built jet a natural fit for the fleet. Between this week’s first production work and that delivery, the line must complete its first aircraft through every station: structure assembly, systems installation, cabin outfitting, engine mounting, and the paint and test flights that precede handoff to an airline.
Airbus expects the Mobile line to eventually ramp up to producing between 40 and 50 A220 aircraft per year by the middle of the next decade, a pace that would make the plant one of the busiest single-aisle jet lines in the country.
Reaching that rate is a multi-year climb — new hangars brought online, supply chains synchronized, hiring in waves to match the flowline’s stations. At 40 to 50 aircraft a year, the A220 line alone would out-produce the entire annual output of most aerospace plants, and it would operate alongside the A320 family line, which has been steadily increasing its own rate since 2015.
The order book behind the expansion
The A220 program has built a substantial order backlog industrywide, with 551 aircraft on order as of the end of June 2019. Airbus and industry analysts see strong long-term demand for the jet, pointing to a global market of an estimated 7,000 aircraft in the 100-to-150-seat category over the next two decades.
That market is the strategic reason the jet exists in Mobile. Airlines have spent two decades replacing 50-seat regional jets and downsized mainline aircraft with a category the industry calls “large narrowbody-lite” — 100 to 150 seats, long range, low fuel burn — and the A220’s geared turbofan engines and modern wing were designed precisely for that demand. A backlog of 551 aircraft covers years of production; Mobile’s line exists to help clear it and to hold Airbus’ share of the category against its rival’s offering.
For the 100-to-150-seat segment, the two-decade forecast of roughly 7,000 aircraft represents one of the largest pools of demand in commercial aviation — and every one of those jets delivered to a U.S. airline customer from the Gulf Coast adds to the case Mobile made when it landed the first line.
The American footprint
The new production line adds to Airbus’ broader economic footprint in the United States. The company has purchased about $48 billion in components and materials from American suppliers over the past three years and says its U.S. operations support more than 275,000 jobs nationwide, including engineering centers in Kansas and Alabama, training facilities in Florida and Colorado, and a corporate headquarters and materials support operation in Virginia.
Those figures are the numbers Airbus deploys in Washington when trade disputes and procurement debates put its American presence on the table. A company that buys $48 billion of U.S. parts, employs hundreds of thousands of American workers indirectly, and assembles its aircraft on U.S. soil occupies a position that no tariff argument reduces to “foreign competitor” — and the A220 line, built in Alabama by American workers, deepens that position.
What it means for Mobile
For Mobile, the A220 line cements the city’s status as home to Airbus’ only U.S. manufacturing hub building more than one commercial aircraft model, a distinction local and state officials have pointed to as validation of years of investment in aerospace infrastructure and workforce training across the region.
The distinction carries practical weight. Single-model plants are vulnerable to a program’s commercial fortunes; a campus with two lines can rebalance work, absorb new programs and justify further investment. Mobile’s city and county governments have backed the campus with road, utility and port improvements, and the state has funded the training pipelines — community college programs, engineering partnerships and the apprenticeship-style hiring Airbus runs — that feed both lines.
The workforce behind the second line
The 400 jobs the A220 line brings arrive on top of the existing A320 workforce, and they are filled the same way the first line was: Mobile-area hires trained to Airbus’ production standards, first in the classroom, then on the assembly floor, and for this program, in Canada. The Mirabel training rotations mean Mobile’s A220 crews learned the jet at the very line where it was born — a transfer of institutional knowledge that usually takes years of trial and error.
The jobs also anchor the aerospace cluster that has grown around the Aeroplex. Suppliers, logistics firms, engineering contractors and service companies cluster near final assembly, and each new line expands the customer base for the firms that support it. Local officials describe the pattern in straightforward terms: the first Airbus line proved Mobile could build jets; the second proves the region can keep winning them.
From first chips to first delivery
The milestones ahead are the ones Gaskell described: first structural assembly completing, first aircraft moving down the flowline, first engine hang, first paint, first test flight, and — in the third quarter of 2020 — the first delivery, a Delta A220-300 that will carry Alabama-built plates inside a Canadian-designed jet assembled in a former Air Force hangar complex on Mobile Bay.
When that airplane is handed over, Mobile will have become what few American cities have been since the jet age began: a place where two different models of commercial airliner are built, tested and delivered. The workers who clocked in this week are the first installment of that promise, and the flowline hangar rising behind them is the building that will carry the program from its first unit to the 40-to-50-a-year pace Airbus has set for the middle of the coming decade.