Airbus A320 – Coming of Age

Amidst the current global crisis of the aviation industry brought upon us by Covid-19 there have been several significant aviation milestones at Airbus in recent days. In mid-September Airbus delivered its 1,500th A330 aircraft to Delta Airlines, while on Friday 9th October Airbus announced it had delivered an A320 MSN 10,000 to Middle East Airlines (MEA).

Firstly, congratulations to those thousands of individuals have been involved in the programmes since their inception to date, it’s a fantastic effort to reach these milestones. The A320 announcement is worth further recognition on whathas created it since the programme inception back in March 1984. It is interesting to note that MEA took delivery of MSN 5000 back in January 2012 meaning it has taken just 8 years to double that number over 36 years of development and production, frankly that it an astonishing production rate for this complex aircraft.

The A320 production processes have been the key to this rate and have really formed the blueprint for all Airbus programmes so it worth recognising what the A320 family delivered upon in a much wider context with its various innovations.

In October 2019 Airbus inaugurated its first production A320 production line with automated manufacturing using robotics. The robot production line is used to complete the fuselage section joins of around 3,000 fasteners per aircraft but drilling, countersinking and installing the fasteners which offers a more efficient, faster production all to a higher and more consistent quality.

Another fundemental development has been Airbus work sharing across its European partners . This has provided a basis for the ever increasing production rates applied to the A320. The number of engineers, and designers required to constantly support a programme like this both in service and production development at a single geographical location would create a shortage of resources, being able to spread this across a wider geographical base throughout Europe ensure a quality workforce is available to support this and other Airbus programmes on a multi-national basis.

Given the success of the Airbus A320 programme further globalisation and work sharing has taken place. Over the years Airbus has increased the number of production lines to support its growing production rate of up to 60 aircraft per month. Today we have a single production line in Toulouse, four in Hamburg including the automated one. This is supported by an additional one in Tianjin, China opening in 2008 and Mobile, Alabama in the United States delivering its first aircraft in 2016. This production spread offers allows Airbus to further widen its resource pool across the world, given the global nature of the aviation business but also offers its customer base a more regionalised approach to aircraft production and deliveries, especially useful in times of crisis such as a global pandemic impacted by national travel restrictions.

Outside of production we need to be cognisant of what the aircraft has offered to not just the aviation community but the world of the fare paying passenger. I anticipate there are very few people in the world who has not flown on an A320 and this type has been well adopted by the low cost carrier (LCC ) revolution of the last two decades that has made low cost travel available throughout the world. In addition to the popularity A320 with CC’s it has also found a profitable market within the business executive market in the form of the Airbus Corporate Jet (ACJ) The aircraft provides luxury on a framework that can be supported worldwide, AviationMover has seen first-hand that this was the basis of many aircraft selections, keeping the CEO’s and CFO’s of the world equally happy.

In terms of technological advances the A320 has been a game changing aircraft. It was the first production airliner to introduce Fly By Wire (FBW). For the uninitiated FBW replaces the conventional manual flight controls of an aircraft with an electronic interface. The movements of flight controls are converted to electronic signals transmitted to the actuators at each control surface by wires, hence the ‘Fly By Wire’ term. While this system was trialed on some earlier aircraft, the A320 was the first to wholly adopt this system. The additional benefits of this decision should also be considered as equally influential as the FBW system itself, they include:

Sidesticks – now a common design philosophy on aircraft large and small but the benefit is that it does allow for more space within the cockpit area, although it certainly does divide the aviation community in a ‘stick’ vs ‘yoke’ debate.

Flight Protection – one of the additional benefits of it is that it can be supported by computer technology that ensures the aircraft not only remains within its flight envelope but also produces inputs within the FBW system to recover from extreme situations, keeping us all much safer as a result.

Commonality – with the simplification introduced by FBW it allows for commonality for the operator. While modern aircraft remain hugely complex machines this system has allowed pilots to have a simplfied common work environment and common handling characteristics between the Airbus family allowing pilots to easily transition to other Airbus types with relative ease.

We already see new developments in the latest variations of the A320NEO including engine develop that is likely to be the norm for future aircraft designs and this will certainly continue in the future with the XLR variant which should be a very useful asset as with thin operating margins, resulting from the pandemic.

In conclusion, any aviation professional, avid amateur or fare paying holidaymaker will recognise that the Airbus A320 has revolutionised aircraft design for the better since its first flight with all 10,000 aircraft. We all love an accurate fact so it’s important to note that Airbus has only delivered around 9,500 aircraft at the time of writing so in around 18 months, depending on the economic recovery Airbus will reach the 10,000 delivered number. Next target, 44,000 aircraft of the Cessna 172. Blue Skies!