Airbus Is Teaching Jetliners to Dance With Robots in Hamburg

Airbus SE has manufactured planes in a maze of brick- and metal-clad buildings outside Hamburg for the better part of three decades. Every day, whale-shaped cargo planes called Belugas touch down on the adjacent airstrip and disgorge fuselage tubes, wings, and cockpit sections that will be joined together into commercial jetliners. The production process has changed little over the years. Passenger jets are some of the world’s most complex machines, but making them remains surprisingly artisanal, with millions of rivets installed largely by hand.

A short stroll from those original production halls, behind the facade of a towering building the length of two football fields, a revolution is taking place. Last year, Airbus inaugurated a facility for the A320 model where the assembly line, the fixed cranes to move the planes, and many of the workers are gone. Instead, there are open spaces, robots, and mobile assembly platforms operated by remote control. “Building an aircraft is basically a long to-do list,” says Eckart Frankenberger, the company’s chief industrial architect, who led the design of the new layout. “The philosophy of this hangar was to make it as flexible as possible and thereby more efficient.”