Airbus doesn´t discard further increases in the A350 monthly production rate.

Airbus will explore ways to raise output of the A350 by seeking production enhancements such as faster manufacturing of carbon components.

“We’ll see improvements and additional buffer in our capacity as we keep improving processes that’ll give us potential for further increases,” A350 program director Didier Evrard said in an interview at the Farnborough Air Show.

Airbus has already created extra capacity at its assembly line in Toulouse and would need to do carbon layering more quickly and speed up installation processes to boost monthly production. That would include faster fitting of electrical equipment, brackets and pipes.

Airbus, in a perennial race with Boeing to supply airlines, has already sold delivery slots for at least the first 2 years of A350 production. Airbus COO-Customer John Leahy has said the biggest challenge to selling more planes is providing delivery schedules that are sufficiently early enough for customers.

“That’s the debate that we can start having in 2016, when we’re already half way through the ramp-up,” Evrard said. “With past aircraft programs, we’ve seen that increasing production by 20% isn’t impossible.”

“The A350-900 until now was managed as a development program,” Evrard said. “We’re now entering into serial production, so we can benefit from all the supply-chain management and Airbus processes” to move more quickly, he said.

Based on the article “Airbus Seeks to Quicken A350 Production With Nippier Processes” published in Bloomberg.