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Snecma's aircraft engine assembly hall at Villaroche, south-east of Paris, is the size of a sports stadium and eerily quiet.
To the murmur of transistor radios, on production lines half a kilometre long, technicians work with a steady efficiency, building up the complicated web of pipes and wires that surround the jet engines' bodies.
Villaroche is one of the best places in the aviation world to be right now, because the plant is due to produce the new, fuel-efficient turbofan CFM International LEAP-X engines, which both Airbus and Boeing have decided to use on their new-look narrowbody planes, the A320neo and the 737Max.
Nearly 2,000 of these engines have been ordered, enough to fill Snecma's order books for the next seven years.
"Their decision has been to re-engine, to answer the market's need for planes which are very robust in the face of high fuel prices," says Snecma's head of new commercial applications, Olivier Longeville.
"The key decision was to help the airlines by buying in some brand new engines, which can be installed on planes quickly."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15571113
To the murmur of transistor radios, on production lines half a kilometre long, technicians work with a steady efficiency, building up the complicated web of pipes and wires that surround the jet engines' bodies.
Villaroche is one of the best places in the aviation world to be right now, because the plant is due to produce the new, fuel-efficient turbofan CFM International LEAP-X engines, which both Airbus and Boeing have decided to use on their new-look narrowbody planes, the A320neo and the 737Max.
Nearly 2,000 of these engines have been ordered, enough to fill Snecma's order books for the next seven years.
"Their decision has been to re-engine, to answer the market's need for planes which are very robust in the face of high fuel prices," says Snecma's head of new commercial applications, Olivier Longeville.
"The key decision was to help the airlines by buying in some brand new engines, which can be installed on planes quickly."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15571113
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