“It’s been night and day how we’re received on Capitol Hill,” McArtor said. And the company says that it saves no money by building planes in Mobile.Īirbus has no doubt that the Mobile plant has earned the company some allies in Congress. Many of the supervisors come from the continent, too the Mobile factory manager was raised about 10 miles from the wing plant in Wales. Here, the American workers attach the pieces of the airplane using tools and connectors, many of which are also imported from Europe. What happens in Mobile doesn’t resemble manufacturing so much as the assembly of a particularly large and tremendously complicated piece of Ikea furniture. The front of the fuselage is made in Saint-Nazaire, France the back, in Hamburg. The vertical stabilizer is made in Getafe, Spain. The finished product is easy to move (it flies), and the hardest work of making it is buried in its components. It’s an odd arrangement for many reasons, not least among them being the fact that Airbus could assemble its planes almost anywhere. There, between the runways, the European aerospace company Airbus has built a $600 million factory to assemble airplanes in the United States. The pieces are set on flatbed trucks and escorted by police cars to a decommissioned Air Force base, Brookley Field, about four miles from the harbor. Loaded upon them are the titanic parts of flying machines: tails, already painted wings, already functional the fuselage, in two segments, front and rear. The ships from Hamburg steam into Mobile Bay several times a month. The following photographs show an Airbus A321 being assembled over the course of six months in a new facility in Mobile, Ala.

Airbus manufacturing locations