![]() Ordinarily this jet would have just come out of the assembly building through the giant doors at the end of the line, which are big enough to let an A320 through. The tail was already painted in the colors of the customer, Aeroflot Russian Airlines. That is what happened with this almost-finished A320, number 7,846 off the assembly line. And that also meant a look at something that most passengers won’t see their airplane do: Being towed ingeniously out of a hangar it is too big for. On a recent visit to Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France, I got a chance to look at the final assembly line for the Airbus single-aisle family - the A319, A320 and A321. (Boeing assembles its jets at three facilities in Seattle and Charleston Airbus has four, in Europe, the US and China.) That’s what Boeing and Airbus do, for example, getting the components from various suppliers around the world and joining them together at one of their several production sites around the world. When a large commercial aircraft enters what’s known as final assembly - the joining of key aircraft sections including the wings, vertical tail plane, and the main fuselage - it comes together in stages, entering the final assembly line (FAL) in pieces and leaving at the end almost ready to fly.
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