Airbus North America headquarters is just outside Washington, D.C., in Herndon, Virginia. The facility employs some 140 people in sales, marketing, and communications for Airbus customers in the U.S. and Canada. This facility also serves as headquarters for Airbus North America Customer Services. The employees here reflect the diversity in nationality that is so commonplace at Airbus worldwide, offering North American customers daily interaction with a company that offers a true global perspective.
Nearby in Ashburn, Virginia, another 75 employees keep the 24-hour Airbus Spares Center humming, shipping aircraft parts, tools and sections to customers in the Americas. This facility is one of three Airbus Spares facilities in the world.
Airbus opened its first design and engineering center outside of Europe in 2002 - in Wichita, Kansas. At Airbus North America Engineering, some 210 engineers are focused on the A340 and A380. The facility doubled its size and tripled its workforce in its first two years of operations. In terms of population percentage, more people work in the aviation and aerospace industries in Wichita than in any city in the world, so Airbus expanding to this locale was a natural fit..
The southernmost U.S. facility is Airbus Training Center in Miami, Florida. The $50 million custom-built complex, one of three Airbus training facilities worldwide, houses 110 staff members dedicated to training more than 3,000 air crew each year in a range of full-flight simulators, trainers and computer-based training programs. Most all the trainees are based in the Americas.
Airbus North America has a Safety and Technical Affairs office in Washington D.C., convenient to the headquarters of the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board. This ten-person office specializes in daily interaction with these federal agencies relative to regulatory issues, continuing to build the positive relationships between Airbus and U.S. government organizations. This facility is also home base for Airbus North America’s government relations staff, allowing easy exchange of information between the manufacturer and U.S. elected representatives.
Construction was completed in early 2007 on the newest Airbus facility in the U.S. – Airbus North America Engineering in Mobile, Alabama. This facility is responsible for various interior elements of Airbus’ newest aircraft, the A350XWB, including design and engineering work on the cabin, crew rest, lavatories and galleys. At full capacity, the office will employ 150 engineers. Should EADS, an Airbus parent company, receive an order to modernize the U.S. Air Force’s tanker fleet with the Northrop Grumman KC-30, this facility could expand into a larger-scale industrial site related to that aircraft.
