Airbus A220 Order Expands as 150 AirAsia Jets Near Mirabel
Airbus is set to unveil an order for as many as 150 airbus a220 jets from AirAsia on Wednesday, and the announcement is expected at the Airbus complex in Mirabel, Que. The deal would be one of Airbus’s biggest ever for the Canadian-made jet and would deepen AirAsia’s reliance on an all-Airbus fleet of about 250 planes.
Mirabel hosts the Airbus announcement
Mark Carney is expected to join Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette and Airbus officials at the Mirabel site, the main assembly location for the A220. The setting puts the order in the middle of Airbus’s Canadian production base, where the company has been trying to steady the program’s output and improve its sales flow since taking over the A220 in 2018.
AirAsia brings scale to the order. The Malaysia-based low-cost carrier was hit hard during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and forced to restructure, then moved back to expansion as it looked to launch a Middle East hub in Bahrain that would serve as a springboard for flights into Europe.
Carney’s export push
Mehran Ebrahimi, an aerospace specialist at the University of Quebec at Montreal, said, "Politically, there’s something important here" about the deal. He also said, "It slides right into Mr. Carney’s strategy of saying ‘We can sell internationally and broaden our export markets,’" adding, "The fact this is a buyer in Asia, where he’s put a lot of emphasis recently and travelled there, is significant."
The order lines up with the Carney government’s effort to double non-U.S. exports within the next decade, and Export Development Canada is expected to help finance the aircraft. For Airbus, the sale would add fresh volume to a program that still has to prove it can keep deliveries moving through supplier and labour issues.
Airbus targets 14 jets a month
Airbus has said it needs to produce 14 A220 jetliners a month at its facilities in Mirabel and Mobile, Ala., for the program to break even. Its new target is to stabilize A220 output at 12 jets a month this year from the current seven or eight, but it has not given a specific timeline for getting to 14.
That gap leaves the Wednesday announcement doing two jobs at once: locking in a marquee sale and showing whether the A220 can keep attracting big airline commitments while Airbus works through production bottlenecks in airframe components and cabin materials. For AirAsia, the next step is execution; for Airbus, the question is whether a headline order translates into a steadier build rate in Mirabel.
