This week, Airbus officially kicked off production of the new A220 jetliner at its facility in Alabama.
The company said its first team of production workers on the narrow-body aircraft in Mobile began building the A220 after returning from training at a facility in Quebec.
The A220, built in partnership with Canadian aerospace company Bombardier, is the second commercial production line at Airbus in Mobile and will add some 400 people to its workforce; Airbus plans to eventually push that number to 1,500 people.
The Alabama facility opened in 2015 to produce the larger A320, and those facilities are manufacturing the initial A220s as construction continues.
The first A220 to be made in the U.S. is slated to be delivered to Delta Air Lines in the third quarter of next year. By the mid-2020s, officials said, Mobile will produce 40 to 50 A220s annually, hopefully making a significant dent in the company’s six-year backlog.
“With Mobile, and our production network in Asia, Canada, and Europe, we have strategically created a worldwide industrial base to better serve our customers,” Jeffrey Knittel, chairman and CEO of the company’s Americas segment said in a statement.
