The boss of Ryanair has threatened to cancel orders with American aircraft maker Boeing and buy from Chinese manufacturers instead if Donald Trump’s trade tariffs push up costs.
The answer is that Airbus has a backlog of 8720 jets, most of them narrow bodies like the A320s that Ryanair would probably want to replace the 737s.
Airbus is looking to expand their production to 75 jets/month by 2027, so if they ordered now, they get by… I don’t know, hopefully someone will math it out for me.
It’s also not in Airbus’s best interest to try and quickly ramp up production as you can get the “Walmart gambit” where you sink in a lot of money, then the tariffs get removed, people crawling back to Boeing and you’re out a shitload of cost.
Not really. Airbus is working on several new designs, and these assembly lines could be repurposed. It’s a pretty riskless investment. Airbus wants to be able to ramp up production, but that is very, very hard to do. building and equiping the factory is the easy part. You have to train people in very complex and specific skills, create seniority scales and workforce structures, etc. and then comes the really, really hard thing, which is getting an already overstrained supply chain up to production levels required by the new line.
