The First Airbus Assembled in China Takes Flight
Airbus delivered the first A320 aircraft assembled in China to Dragon Aviation
Leasing. Sichuan Airlines will deploy the aircraft on the Beijing, Shanghai and
Taipei routes.
The Tianjin factory was launched in September last year as Airbus’ first
aircraft final assembly line outside Europe. The A320 final assembly line in
Tianjin will roll out 10 more aircraft this year.
Tom Enders, Airbus president and CEO, said that the company would retain
its original plan to ramp up the production rate at Tianjin, to assemble four jets
per month by the end of 2011. With an investment of more than 7 billion yuan
($1 billion), the Tianjin assembly plant is 51 percent owned by Airbus and 49
percent owned by Tianjin Zhongtian Aviation Industry Investment Co. Enders
guaranteed that the A320 planes assembled in Tianjin shared the same
standards as those made in Europe.
China introduced its first Airbus aircraft in 1985. By the end of April, the
number of Airbus aircraft in operation on the mainland hit 488, compared with
29 in 1995, according to Airbus data.

It has been regarded as a strategic project for Airbus, not only to generate
incremental sales in China, but also to ramp up the production capacity of its
best-selling single-aisle A320 family of aircraft to meet strong market demand.
Airbus' US rival, Boeing, said last week during the Paris air show that the
downturn in the commercial aircraft market has hit bottom and a recovery will
come next year.
"The situation in China is much better than the rest of the world. China's
domestic passenger traffic grew 17.3 percent year-on-year in the year's first
four months. Sichuan Airlines is the largest carrier in China with a pure Airbus
fleet of 40 A320s. According to industry estimates, China will need about
3,000 passenger aircraft over the next 20 years.
Biography
Dr. Janice Yu, is a senior e-learning analyst of TutorChinese
with focus on online language education research. She is also a news editor
of the Government Information Office in Taiwan. Previously she wrote
columns on international politics and economy in the Central Daily News. In
1998, Yu was a Jefferson Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii and she

won the 1999 Distinguished Women Journalist Award from Friends of the
East-West Center Foundation. Yu completed her PhD at the University of
Iowa and served as a news editor at the China Television Company. Yu has
published around 30 books.