Airbus has launched its highly automated fuselage organized assembly line for A320 Family aircraft in Hamburg, boasting off an evolution in Airbus’ industrial production facility m
With additional stress being put on manufacturing longer sections for the A321LR, the new facility also comes with 20 robots, a fresh logistics concept, fully automatic positioning by laser measurement as well as a digital data collecting system.
These will give a lot of support Airbus’ drive to increase both quality and effectiveness while giving a higher level of digitalization to its industrial production system.
“By making way for some of the brand new innovative technologies and processes, Airbus has started its journey to stamp new standards in A320 Family production. This all-new fuselage structure assembly line is a much-required enabler for the A320 Family clean up.
We have to up the level of automation and robotics enables faster, more effective manufacturing while holding onto our primary focus on quality,” said Michael Schoellhorn, Airbus Chief Operating Officer.
“Given the huge success of the A320 Family and the order backlog, we are taking the essential steps to keep our production system to match the brilliance of our products and that we are able to cater to our customers’ requirements for our single-aisle aircraft.”
He also mentioned: “Am advanced level of trust and investment has been issued in our people and factories in Hamburg.
We now need to supply in line with our commitments made to customers while making sure we retain overall competitiveness.”
For the first section assembly, Airbus is making use of a modular, lightweight automated tech, called “Flextrack”, with eight robots drilling and counter-sinking 1,100 to 2,400 holes per longitudinal joint.
In the next step of production, 12 robots, each operating on seven axes, will put together the center and aft fuselage sections with the tail to create one major component, drilling, counter-sinking, sealing and inducing 3,000 rivets per orbital joint.
