Airframes

At the heart of all Airbus aircraft are aerostructures – the major assembly elements that come together in creating their airframes, including fuselage sections, wing components and flight control surfaces, along with fairings, doors and bulkheads.

The high quality and precision build of these aerostructures – along with the speed of their assembly – are critical in maintaining Airbus’ production cadence and its ability to deliver optimised, efficient aircraft for operators around the world.

In addition to working with key global supply chain partners, Airbus is constantly looking to strengthen its own core airframe assembly activities to meet the increasing demands of the industry in terms of technological evolution, new skills development and competitiveness.

For fuselage aerostructures activities, which previously were mostly performed both in Airbus plants hosted in France and Germany, and in former Airbus subsidiaries STELIA Aerospace and Premium AEROTEC, part of this journey has involved the creation of two new companies.

Airbus Atlantic, was established on 1 January 2022, gathering forces, resources and means of Airbus Nantes and Montoir-de-Bretagne plants, central functions associated with these activities and STELIA Aerospace sites worldwide. Airbus Atlantic counts 13,000 employees in 5 countries and 3 continents.

Airbus Aerostructures, established on 1 July 2022, brings together about 8,400 employees in four production sites in Germany: former Airbus plants of Stade and Hamburg, which now hosts the subsidiary headquarters, and the former Premium AEROTEC plants of Nordenham and Bremen.

These two strong, vertically-integrated businesses – acting as internal Tier-1 champions – will shape the future of Airbus products and the industrial system.

Discover more