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Airbus confirms panel issue, lowers delivery target
(Sharecast News) - Airbus has confirmed the discovery of a quality issue on fuselage panels and lowered its delivery target for commercial aircraft to about 790 this year from 820.
Engineers at the aerospace giant found the defects on a wider set of A320 fuselage panels, with around 40% of the affected jets still in assembly lines. The affected parts reportedly have the wrong thickness.
The issue comes just days after the plane maker warned thousands of its A320 jets needed an emergency software fix due to possible corruption from solar radiation. Most of the 6,000 planes affected by the problem received the software update over the weekend with minimal disruption to flight schedules.
A presentation to airlines showed that the total number of planes needing inspections for recently discovered quality problems on metal panels at the front of some planes was 628, including 168 already in service, news service Reuters reported.
This figure also includes 245 in assembly lines, according to the presentation, of which industry sources said about 100 are earmarked for delivery this year. A further 215 are in an earlier stage of production called 'Major Component Assembly', Bloomberg reported.
Additionally, some panels at the rear and other parts of the jet have been found to have similar thickness problems, though none are on planes currently in service, the presentation showed.
"We confirm the population of aircraft potentially impacted is both in production and in service," an Airbus spokesperson said.
CEO Guillaume Faury said the company was "assessing" the impact of the panel problem on deliveries.
"We had a rather weak November because we had aircraft that we had to stop in the process of going from the end of production to delivery: (aircraft) that are finished but with a question on the panels," Faury said on Tuesday.
"We have to assess the situation of those aircraft and the ones that will be produced and delivered before the end of the year. That creates for December, which was already very backloaded, another challenge," he added.
Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com
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