Kevin O'Toole/Toulouse
Airbus INDUSTRIE handed over the first A319 to Air Canada on 12 December, the first of the type to go into operation in North America and also the first Airbus aircraft to be delivered on a nine-month production lead time.
Airbus and Boeing have been aiming to slim down the time between aircraft definition and delivery to around nine months. The European consortium says that bringing definition closer to the in-service date allows the airline operator to tailor the aircraft more closely to the prevailing market conditions and shortens the lead-time for payments on customer-furnished equipment.
The company says that lead times for the A319/320/321 narrow-body family had typically been running at around a year or more. A similar reduction is in train for the wide-body family, with the aim of bringing down the definition-to-delivery cycle to around a year.
Production rates for the single-aisle range are also being increased to meet growing demand. The current rate at the end of this year is up to nine a month, but is due to rise to 13 a month by December 1997.
Commercial director, John Leahy says that overall the consortium will have delivered 125-130 aircraft in 1996, with a planned increase to around 190 in 1997 as the rising tide of orders feeds through to the production lines.
That would take the consortium close to its current ceiling of manufacturing capacity of some 220 aircraft a year. Leahy adds that the consortium received around 300 orders, worth in the region of $20 billion, during 1996, with only around 25 cancellations, and the 1997 tally is expected to be "at around the same level".
Air Canada itself is to take its 35 A319s, ordered in 1994, at a rate of two a month up to June 1998. The aircraft will be used to shore up the airline's expanding Canada-US transborder services, says Air Canada president Lamar Durrett. Since the signing of an open-skies agreement between the two countries almost two years ago, Air Canada has launched 33 new transborder services spearheaded by the 50-seat Bombardier Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ) and the 132-seat A320.
Durret says that the 112-seat A319s will take over some of the CRJ routes as they begin to mature, such as Toronto-NewYork, while the regional jets are used to cede new city pairs. He says, a minimum of another four transborder services, are planned for 1997. Overall, Air Canada has identified 64 possible city pairs, which could support services with the regional aircraft. No more narrow-body purchases are planned.
Source: Flight International
