This tale at the beginning seemed on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.
That is an important second within the lifetime of an airliner: when the brand new proprietor indicators for it and alternatives it up, just like a motive force selecting up a brand new automobile from a broker.
The plane in query is an Airbus A321neo, and it’s parked at Hamburg-Finkenwerder, the German town’s 2nd airport, which Airbus makes use of for checking out, logistics, and supply of airplanes to shoppers. Amassed across the airplane are pilots and cabin workforce, in addition to two executives from Wizz Air, the cheap Hungarian airline this is about to take supply of it.
Airways and producers by no means expose how a lot they pay for person plane—in part as a result of costs rely on many components, together with the choice of planes bought and the economic historical past of each and every person airline—however purchasing a airplane isn’t reasonable. The bottom worth of a unmarried Airbus A321neo is estimated to be round $110 million.
This actual airplane, registered by way of Wizz Air as H9-WNM, used to be produced in Airbus’s Hamburg manufacturing unit in simply over a yr. The web page is without doubt one of the corporate’s 4 manufacturing facilities, the others being in Toulouse, France; Cellular, Alabama; and Tianjin, China. Referred to as ultimate meeting traces (FAL), those large workshops are the place a airplane’s structural portions, on-board electronics, hydraulic and mechanical elements, and different items all come in combination.
The overall arming means of an Airbus A320neo in Hamburg.{Photograph}: Antonio Dini
However ahead of those elements succeed in the FAL, they want to be manufactured. Some are made internally by way of Airbus, others by way of 3rd events, and in combination making them comes to dozens of factories and facilities around the world. Then there may be the ambitious logistical problem of bringing all of them in combination. This complicated ballet comes to shipments by way of boat, teach, highway, and air, with a small fleet of particular shipping planes—referred to as Belugas—taking part in a key position. Those plane, with their prodigious girth that makes them resemble beluga whales, have been created by way of Airbus to transport massive elements comparable to fuselages from one manufacturing heart to every other.
