Airbus Edges Ever Closer To A321XLR Mass Production

Working hard at its various facilities in the UK, Germany, and France, planemaker Airbus continues to make progress on its highly anticipated A321XLR. Earlier this week, the company gave us further insight into the development of the type and the equipment being used to prepare the model for mass production.

Bringing an aircraft to market – especially one that is mass-produced – doesn’t come easily- well, not if you want it to be safe and reliable. To ensure that the production process has a solid foundation in which all potential flaws and complications are identified, Airbus is sparing no expense in its testing and use of demonstrators, both physical and virtual. As such, the company provided an in-depth look into the process as it relates to the exciting, new A321XLR.

Components and parts in the final test phase

Airbus announced at the end of March that it has been preparing major component production lines for manufacturing the A321XLR. These production lines are situated at various Airbus facilities across the UK, Germany, and France.

Furthermore, the planemaker has announced that many A321XLR components and parts are “now in the final test phase to de-risk the route to flight clearance and serial manufacturing.”

As part of these final phases, various demonstrators will validate design work and assembly processes, ensuring that the parts are fully prepared for manufacturing. Additionally, full-size demonstrators are being used to pre-train production-line staff at the final assembly facility in Hamburg, where the first A321XLR will be built.

As part of Airbus’ media release, Gary O’Donnell, Head of the A321XLR program, notes that the use of these demonstrators can be divided into three steps:

1. “The early physical demonstrators and the virtual demonstrators enable us to validate our design decisions and close these topics.
2. “Then we have the second stage: the full-scale production standard demonstrators which primarily support the training and the industrial process maturity, and they help secure our ramp-up, as we run them ‘at rate’. 
3. “Then for the third level, we are running demonstrators for maintenance, repair and customer support teams, in order that they can use the demonstrators to create the airline documents, the technical documents and repair manuals,”

Combining physical demonstrators with VR and AR

O’Donnell went on to explain that there is a mixture of physical demonstrators with both virtual reality and augmented reality- also known as VR and AR, respectively.

“[This allows] the teams to really test how they can change and fix parts in the operations system – whether in a hangar or on the apron, so that when they are writing the repair manuals or the technical documents they have been able to check on these virtual references to make the process easier.” -Gary O’Donnell, Head of the A321XLR program, Airbus