Thursday, March 03, 2016

Parts arrive for 8th Airbus plane to be built in Mobile, Alabama




MOBILE, AL (WALA) -

FOX10 News has been following Airbus in Mobile since the project was announced.

Parts for the next plane to built at the Airbus facility at Brookley Aeroplex have now arrived in Mobile.
  
Four large sections of an airplane sit in front of APM Terminals in Mobile, not far from Choctaw Pass.

They make up the eighth plane to be built at the Airbus Final Assembly Line.

Denson White with APM Terminals says, "The Airbus parts have been coming since last summer, and we've been getting them in about every five to six weeks."  

The sections of the aircraft, part of the A320 family of planes, come from Germany by ship to the Port of Mobile

White said, "These come in on a charter vessel and we brought that in yesterday, came alongside and, then, we took the parts off and move them up, stage them, and they get ready to move over to the Final Assembly Line, probably tomorrow."

The first plane to be built in Mobile will be delivered to Jet Blue, but this one and the others will go to American Airlines.

White says he just returned from a shipping industry conference, called Trans- Pacific Maritime, in California, where Mobile's Airbus facility got  a lot of attention.

White said, "The Airbus piece was really a large discussion point out at our big industry conference, TPM out in Los Angeles, and in Long Beach this week. It's really brought Mobile to a forefront in the containerized import industry." 

Airbus will likely get a lot more worldwide attention when the first plane built in Mobile rolls out of the Final Assembly Line.

As far as a timetable,  Airbus officials have only said the first plane is expected to be delivered in the spring.

Original article can be found at: http://www.fox10tv.com

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