Editors are joined by AeroDynamic Advisory Managing Director Richard Aboulafia to discuss the progress of airliner production by Airbus in Alabama and Boeing in South Carolina.

A Tale Of Two FALS—Airbus In Mobile And Boeing In Charleston

Aviation Week's Check 6 Podcast

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Aviation Week's Check 6 Podcast

## Participants

- **Christine Boynton** (Aviation Week Network)
- **Jens Flotau** (Aviation Week Network)
- **Sean Broderick** (Aviation Week Network)
- **Richard Aboulafia** (Aerodynamic Advisory)

## Transcript

Welcome to Aviation Week's Check 6 Podcast. I'm Christine Boynton, Senior Editor for Air Transport in the Americas, and today we're talking about Airbus and Boeing, specifically their production lines here in the U.S. For Airbus, opening a final assembly line in Mobile, Alabama 10 years ago was a strategic and political move. Now it's an integral part of the Airframers' narrowbody growth plans. At Boeing, the production campus in Charleston, South Carolina is working to double its 787 final assembly space, for which it held a formal groundbreaking ceremony late last year.

As we know, the last few years have been full of constraints affecting aircraft delivery schedules, but at the end of 2025, both Airframers seemed hopeful that some limitations could ease in 2026. So what can they deliver in the near term, and is investment in further capacity justified? Joining me to break all of this down are Jens Flottau, Executive Editor for Commercial Aviation, Senior Editor Sean Broderick, and Special Guest Richard Abulafia, a Managing Director at Aerodynamic Advisory.

Jens, I'm going to kick it off with you first, because you just visited Airbus in Mobile. And to back up just a bit, their initial plans for that site were actually quite different than what they are today. Is that right? Yeah, totally. I mean, the initial plans go to go back to the mid-2000s when Airbus was competing for the U.S. Air Force tanker program together with Northrop Grumman. And the idea was to put production into Mobile, but there was nothing on the horizon at the time for commercial aircraft.

They were trying to also propose a security freighter completion there. At the end of the day, they lost the tanker competition and changed course a few years later and said, yeah, it actually would make strategic sense to put in a final assembly line for commercial aircraft, the A320, and later the A320neo family specifically. So that's what they're doing.

Preparing for this, I looked back at some of my old stories and some of our old stories. And it's quite interesting. At the time, they were talking about what else can we do there? They were talking about MRO facilities and component manufacturing. And Tom Enders, the CEO at the time, said, well, let's crawl, walk and run. So basically, he saw this development.

But if we look back at the last 10 years, then the picture is actually a little bit different from what they themselves probably expected back then. So here we are 10 years on from that first delivery to JetBlue. And what have they accomplished since then? So I have some stats. According to our own fleet database, they have delivered 530 aircraft since then. The ramper was very slow initially, as you...

A Tale Of Two FALS—Airbus In Mobile And Boeing In Charleston

Transcript

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A Tale Of Two FALS—Airbus In Mobile And Boeing In Charleston

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.