How the Beluga kept Wales in the Airbus family

Does the Beluga exist because of Broughton? Or does Broughton remain on the map because of the Beluga?
It is the chicken-and-egg industrial conundrum, which, irrespective of the answer, sustains more than 10,000 jobs in north Wales and around the UK supply chain and which keeps Britain in the premier league of the global aerospace sector.
Beluga is the peculiarly outsized freighter aircraft, so-called because of its resemblance to the Arctic whale, designed and created by Airbus to ship wings, fuselages and tails around its various European factories and which this week celebrates its 30th anniversary in operation.
Broughton is the Airbus factory near Chester that builds wings for the aircraft manufacturer’s short-haul and long-haul planes and directly employs 5,000 people.
There are six Beluga in service, customised out of the manufacturer’s A330 jetliner, with a roster of 55 specially trained pilots. The freighters operate between Airbus’s main sites: final assembly in Toulouse in France and its satellite plants of Hamburg in Germany, Getafe in Spain and Broughton in the UK, where Airbus also has facilities at Filton near Bristol.
That Airbus has a big manufacturing plant in the UK is not so much an accident of history as a fact of past politico-industrial carve ups: envisaged as a European powerhouse competitor to Boeing, Airbus at its inception in 1970 shared workstreams around the continent and Britain got the wings.
Despite the subsequent historical jolts of BAE Systems selling the UK’s 20 per cent stake in Airbus for a song and then the inconveniences of Brexit, Broughton has retained its role manufacturing 700 pairs of wings a year for A320, A330 and A350 aircraft. That entails shipments, mainly to Toulouse, and the to-ing and fro-ing at Broughton on average four times a day of a Beluga taking out as many as four wings at a time.
In the early days of Airbus the inter-plant freighter role was initially played by a Super Guppy, an outsized plane ironically built by the company’s great rival Boeing for the Nasa space programmes. Airbus built the first generation of its own version, the Beluga, which went into service in 1994.
While Beluga is the solution to the historically federated manufacturing geography of Airbus, it has enabled Broughton to continue to exist when an alternative business strategy from Airbus leaders could easily have seen it wither.
“It is the glue of our UK manufacturing,” Paul Kilmister, head of Airbus UK supply chain, said of the role of the Beluga in Britain’s relationship with Airbus. “We have a specific capability in wing at Broughton but the wing also means fuel systems to the engines and the landing gear all of which is developed in Filton. There is a lot of intellectual property.”