This story originally appeared in WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.
This is the most important moment in the life of a passenger aircraft: when the new owner signs for it and picks it up, much like a driver picks up a new car at a dealership.
The aircraft in question is an Airbus A321neo and is parked at Hamburg-Finkenwerder, the German city’s second airport, which Airbus uses for testing, logistics and delivery of aircraft to customers. Surrounding the aircraft are the pilots and cabin crew, as well as two executives from Wizz Air, the Hungarian low-cost airline that is about to take delivery of it.
Airlines and manufacturers never disclose how much they pay for each plane (partly because prices depend on many factors, including the number of planes purchased and each airline’s business history), but buying a plane is never cheap. The base price for a single Airbus A321neo is estimated to be around $110 million.
This particular aircraft, registered by Wizz Air as H9-WNM, was produced at Airbus’s Hamburg factory in just over a year. The site is one of the company’s four production sites, the others being in Toulouse, France; Mobile, Alabama; and Tianjin, China. Known as final assembly lines (FALs), these giant workshops are where an aircraft’s structural parts, onboard electronics, hydraulic and mechanical components, and other parts are put together.
The final assembly process of an Airbus A320neo in Hamburg.Photography: Antonio Dini
But before these components reach the FAL, they need to be manufactured. Some are made in-house at Airbus, others by third parties, and their manufacture involves dozens of factories and sites around the world. Then there is the enormous logistical challenge of bringing it all together. This complex ballet involves shipments by ship, rail, road and air, using a small fleet of special transport aircraft, known as Belugas—play a key role. These aircraft, with their prodigious girth that makes them resemble beluga whales, were created by Airbus to transport large components, such as fuselages, from one production site to another.
