Airbus Delivers First Lagardère A321neo to Pegasus Airlines

Fourteen months since the first fuselage sections entered the line, Airbus has finally delivered the A321neo that has been assembled in the former A380 Jean-Luc Lagardère complex in Toulouse. The aircraft was delivered on Wednesday to Pegasus Airlines as its 41st A321neo. When AirInsight visited Airbus in February for the 2022 annual results press conference, we were offered a tour of the new final assembly facility. The forward and center/aft fuselage sections were already in stations 42 and 43, having arrived in October 2022. At the time, Airbus was unwilling to confirm that MSN11281 was indeed destined for Pegasus. The airframe slowly progressed through the different assembly stations 40, 37, and 35, before it was largely complete and rolled on its own wheels to one of the bays at station 25 for cabin outfitting. From there, aircraft go to the paint shop and receive their engines. “The first aircraft will have a specific long lead time, because the objective is to make sure that the industrial system is ok, to test it, to prove it, so we can lay the right foundations for a steep ramp up,” said Head of A320 FAL in Toulouse, Marion Smeyers, in February. Frame 11281 rolled out of final assembly complete with interior earlier in December, ready to start the flight testing phase that would lead to today’s delivery. Pegasus has orders for 108 A321neo's after the carrier exercised options on 36 aircraft in July. Only A321neo's The FAL in the Lagardère will only assemble A321s, Airbus said earlier, as this is the most popular type of the Airbus family. At the end of November, the airframer had 4.403 A321neo’s, -LRs, and -XLRs in the backlog. Since then, it has received more orders, including 100 from lessor Avolon, 157 from easyJet for the A320neo and A321neo, and 40 purchase rights from Lufthansa Group. Airbus plans to gradually ramp up production in the new complex, with work in progress being done on five frames at the same time. The FAL is highly automated and uses automated guided vehicles to move sections and pick up parts, flextrack robots for riveting, and more digital tools to reduce the physical workload and ease final assembly. Although FAL4 in Hamburg is also highly automated, it is not identical to the new FAL in Toulouse. Airbus had two A320neo FALs in Toulouse, but one will close down and the other one will be updated to continue assembling the A320neo. Hamburg has four A320neo family lines, Tianjin has two A320/A321neo lines, and work on a second combined line has started recently in Mobile (Alabama). This brings the total to 10 assembly lines by the end of 2024. The Lagardère complex should be fully up to speed by the end of 2024. This originally coincided with the ramp-up of the production rate to 75 A320neo family aircraft by 2025, but this has been postponed until 2026 to give suppliers more time for the higher rate. The A320neo family is sold out until 2030.

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