Airbus hopes digital technology will enable higher production
and trigger a significant shift in research and development
spending toward high-tech manufacturing.
The planemaker is ramping up production of the single-aisle A320
jet, which competes with Boeing's 737, from 50 to 60 planes per
month. Airbus has sold 8,000 of the jets with another 6,000 on
order.
The new final assembly line in Hamburg, like other lines, has a
top rate of 10 aircraft per month, which it will reach by
mid-2019.
The two robots, whose names were chosen by employees, will in
particular help to drill over 2,000 holes to join the two halves
of the fuselage together, work normally done by humans.
They form part of a new final assembly line where the fuselage
and wings are transported by automated moving tooling platforms,
rather than being lowered by cranes onto fixed jigs, and where
dynamic laser tracking is used to perfectly align aircraft
parts.
The savings from the new technologies are not about time, but
about precision and ergonomics, Airbus staff said.
"It's more efficient when you are not drilling all holes by
hand," Klaus Roewe, head of the A320 family program, told
reporters in Hamburg, saying that the other new technologies for
maneuvering parts would help to reduce the likelihood of damage
or errors.
Roewe said around one-third of the new technologies on the new
final assembly line could potentially be transferred to other
lines, whether in existing ones in Hamburg, France, China, or
the United States.
"The priority is to ramp up and then we will start thinking
about what we can transfer," he said.
Airbus has also extended and modernized its delivery center for
the A320 family in Hamburg as part of plans to help it deal with
the production ramp-up.
(Reporting by Victoria Bryan; editing by David Evans)
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