Airbus: Supply Chain Improving, but Challenges Remain

Toulouse (France), Mar 26 (PTI) The supply chain situation in the aviation market is slowly improving and the bottlenecks vary for different aircraft manufacturing programmes while the efforts are to find the "sweet spot" between supply and demand, according to aircraft maker Airbus.

With rising air traffic, airlines are looking to expand their fleet as well as networks but persisting supply chain constraints due to multiple factors have resulted in inadequate availability of components and subsequent delays in aircraft deliveries.

"The demand is higher than the supply. We are pulling the supply chain reasonably as much as we can. We don't want to pull too hard. When we pull too hard, it doesn't deliver what we expect and we have to revise our plans down.

"We need to find the sweet spot between the demand and the supply... we want to accelerate moving forward," Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury has said.

During an interaction with journalists from India on the sidelines of the Airbus Summit 2025 in Toulouse on Tuesday, Faury also said the supply chain is getting better and there are a small number of difficult cases that it is trying to manage, including those related to Spirit Aerosystems in the US.

"Today, things are getting better... let's hope for the best and prepare for the worst. We have contingency plans (in place)...," he noted.

Chief Executive Officer of the commercial aircraft business at Airbus Christian Scherer said there are constraints and are being addressed.

He told PTI on Monday that the overall situation is slightly improving and the issues vary for aircraft programmes.

According to him, for the single-aisle A321 planes, the bottleneck is the engines.

"For A350s (planes), it is the fuselage section from the American supplier Spirit Aerosystems, for A220s (planes), it is the wings from the same American supplier and for A330s, it is the landing gears from another supplier," he said.

Earlier this month, Air India CEO and MD Campbell Wilson said the aviation market worldwide is likely to remain "supply constrained" for another four to five years.

Meanwhile, elaborating on the supply chain system, Executive Vice President Operations of the Commercial Aircraft business at Airbus Florent Massou said that everyday millions of parts are being used for making aircraft.

"We pull in 11,000 suppliers every day to achieve that... So managing crisis is our daily lives," he said and added that the overall ecosystem is catching up with the approach of being "less mechanical and more organic" towards the supply chain making a big difference.

Out of all 11,000 suppliers, always something is going on.

"What's interesting in the current landscape is that with two-third of the suppliers, we absolutely don't have any issues, 30 per cent are on watch and 99 per cent of the time, there is no issue and 1 per cent we need to take care...," he noted.