Supporting a growing fleet

Just as the Airbus commercial aircraft fleet is expanding, support on the ground is growing too. The company recently inaugurated an ultramodern Customer Care Centre at its Toulouse headquarters. Its purpose? To further strengthen support and dialogue with our customers.

The global commercial aircraft fleet is growing – and digitising. The numbers tell the story: in 2024, aftermarket services supported some 27,000 aircraft of all types including 12,000 in-service Airbus aircraft. Moreover, Airbus predicts that number will rise to 48,000 in 2043 resulting in a services market valued at $290 billion.

That growth makes operational support more complex. In everyday terms, more aircraft require more skilled maintenance personnel, greater repair and overhaul capacity, more pilots and cabin crew, and more facilities to train them. In short, services are instrumental in enabling air traffic growth.

A new Customer Care Centre

To keep the pace, Airbus has inaugurated a new Customer Care Centre at its Toulouse, France headquarters. It joins a dedicated support network that covers Germany, Spain, the UK, the US, India, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and China.

The Toulouse Centre was three years in the making. Today, it is home to a 900-strong multi-functional, multi-national Airbus team. It is  united by a double-headed ambition: to resolve in-service events quickly, then bring the time needed to do so down further still.

At the building’s heart is AIRTAC, the Airbus Technical Aircraft-on-Ground Centre. Designed to resemble an airline operations room, AIRTAC is almost twice the size of its previous incarnation.

Round-the-clock support

AIRTAC is Airbus’ support front line. Its responders sit in concentric circles around the totem: a floor-to-ceiling column of large, busy screens filled with charts and indicators that flash red and green. The closer the responders are to the totem, the more urgent the requests they handle. The atmosphere is hushed, studious.

The totem provides an at-a-glance status of every ‘aircraft-on-ground’ (AOG) event logged around the world, at any given time. AIRTAC receives a request for support roughly every 20 minutes. Events range from minor system errors to complex structural repairs. Inevitably, as the fleet grows the number of potential operational disruptions will rise too.

Airbus’ support and engineering teams handle a wide variety of AOG events. In each case, AIRTAC’s responders are the customer’s single point of contact, coordinating internally to address the issue promptly and ensuring that Airbus speaks to customers with one voice until the AOG is resolved.   

Elsewhere in the Centre, multifunctional Airbus teams are busy developing and rolling out ever-more sophisticated digital services that can anticipate a grounding before it happens. Collectively, these are known as aircraft health monitoring and predictive maintenance.

Wellbeing and energy efficiency

The Toulouse Customer Care Centre was designed with accessibility, wellbeing and, thanks to the choice of construction materials, sustainability in mind. Its large windows make the most of natural light, and its many open spaces encourage discussion and collaboration.

Solar panels, LED lighting, a turf roof and rainwater recycling all ensure a high degree of energy autonomy. Customers are hosted in a dedicated suite that offers private meeting rooms and secure communications.

The new Centre offers a revealing glimpse into how Airbus is scaling up its customer service organisation to support a commercial aircraft fleet that has at least 20 years’ continuous growth ahead of it. Specialists from every corner of the company come together to optimise fleet efficiency, developing digital solutions that contribute to airline customers’ decarbonisation journey.

Summarising that vision, Airbus Head of Customer Services Cristina Aguilar says that, “we want to be our customers’ companion all along the aircraft lifecycle, acting together for safe and sustainable aerospace. Services should be one of the key reasons our customers choose Airbus.”