Airbus quietly passed a significant milestone in the A320 story during August with the 10,000th delivery, 33 years after the first back in April 1988.
Airbus probably chose not to publicly mark the achievement as it had already made a fanfare about the delivery of A320 serial number “10000” to MEA in October last year. But confusingly this A321neo was in fact delivery number 9,532 according to Cirium data – the discrepancy created by the revised serial number format Airbus adopted last year to accommodate six numerals.
The actual 10,000th A320 delivery was the last of three completed on 30 August 2021: two A320neos (to Indigo, VT-ISY and China Eastern, B-325T) and one A321neo (to Gulf Air, A9C-ND). These were delivered from Airbus’s Toulouse, Tianjin and Hamburg lines, respectively. The first A320 was handed over in Toulouse to launch customer Air France in April 1988.
To put the delivery milestone into perspective, the original business case for the A320’s launch investment was based around a forecast of some 600 deliveries. That was based on the original 150-seat A320 variant, for which total deliveries now exceed 10 times that forecast. The total orderbook for all variants in the A320ceo/A320neo family is now close to 15,700 aircraft.Read more
