Airbus to hire 400 British engineers in race against crisis-hit Boeing

Broughton's West Factory site covers an area larger than 10 football pitches - Paul Cooper

Airbus is to hire 400 engineers at its wing manufacturing plant in Wales as the company races to extend its lead over crisis-hit Boeing in the market for single-aisle jets.

Additional staff will be required at the plant in Broughton, near Chester, as Airbus transforms a building that made wings for the A380 superjumbo into a production line for the best-selling A320neo model.

Covering an area larger than 10 football pitches, the West Factory site is key to plans to lift monthly A320 output from an average of 48 last year to 75 by the end of 2026.

Airbus is also adding staff at its existing A320 facility at the Broughton complex, which makes 90pc of the European company’s wings.

Jerome Blandin, Airbus’s head of global wing production, said the new line will not be as fully automated as the plant’s most recent new A320 wing line, which opened seven years ago, making it potentially more labour intensive.

Airbus's head of global wing production, Jerome Blandin, is overseeing efforts to ramp up output at its main UK manufacturing plant - Paul Cooper

The ramp up will help Airbus reduce its six-year manufacturing backlog for the model and make space for new orders. It is expected to heap more pressure on Boeing as the US business slows build rates to address the safety crisis surrounding its 737 Max, the chief global rival to the A320.

Broughton currently employs about 5,000 people and is Airbus’s main UK manufacturing site. A second wing facility at Filton in Bristol is a focus for design, engineering and support and has about 3,000 staff.

The recruitment drive for the new plant comes after Airbus added 1,100 staff in Britain last year across divisions also including defence and space.

The expansion is a far cry from the years before Brexit, when then boss Tom Enders warned that a no-deal departure from the European Union would force Airbus to make some “potentially very harmful decisions for the UK”, including moving wing production elsewhere.

Mr Blandin said one of the challenges for Broughton is to keep pace with the demands of the company’s A320 assembly lines in Toulouse, Hamburg, Alabama and China, while constantly honing the production process for what remains a traditional, metal wing.

It takes between six and seven weeks to make an Airbus wing - Paul Cooper

He said: “We will see a level of improvement and a better efficiency on the new production line in terms of how we put the product together.”

Airbus has already taken steps to increase A320 wing capacity at Broughton’s original East Factory site, located across the runway from the former A380 building and dating to 1939, when it was built for the construction of Lancaster and Wellington bombers.

Production is running round the clock in a three-shift pattern and Airbus has taken steps to compress each part of the manufacturing process in an effort to shave days off the six to seven weeks required to make a wing.

The last wholesale expansion of A320 manufacturing capabilities at Broughton came in 2016 with the opening of a new, fully automated production line alongside the existing one, which extended capacity by 26 aircraft wingsets a month to the current 63.

Mr Blandin said that site is possibly too automated and that the new line will take more of a hybrid approach, with robots and time-saving equipment heavily involved but the wings no longer moving in a car-factory style fashion, balancing efficiency with flexibility.

The West Factory is scheduled to commence production next year, with the site cleared of equipment from the A380 programme and production jigs suitable for the smaller A320 under construction at Spanish engineering firm MTorres.

Two paint shops at Broughton, which also makes wings for the A330 and A350 widebodies, are also being extended to cope with the extra work.

Broughton will gain hundreds more jobs if Airbus wins a £1.2bn helicopter order to replace ageing RAF Pumas, having promised to assemble them at the Chester site.

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