Airbus has nearly 40 A320neo-family jets awaiting engines at its facilities, but commercial aircraft chief Christian Scherer says the underlying single-aisle production performance is trending upwards.

The airframer delivered 189 of the single-aisle models in the five months to the end of May, compared with 208 last year.

But speaking during a briefing in Toulouse on 11 June, Scherer said: “Were it not for those engineless aircraft, our delivery performance would be slightly above plan right now.

“Which is an indication that the overall health of this ecosystem has vastly improved – including our own operation.”

A320neo-family aircraft are fitted with CFM International Leap-1A or Pratt & Whitney PW1100G powerplants. The current parking of near-complete aircraft is the result of hold-ups in Leap-1A supply.

“While we’re frustrated because we can’t hang engines on airplanes that are mostly completely finished, I call it good cholesterol, the inventory we have,” says Scherer.

“As soon as we get the engines these [aircraft] will go. And we’ll be then happy with our delivery performance.”

He points out that the company has a “mature” working relationship with CFM, but adds: “There isn’t a date by which a bunch of engines will show up.

“There is a gradual increase – which we see and verify – in the output of engines [from] CFM that get shipped to us.”

Scherer says the airframer’s financial performance – which is correlated with deliveries – is “by and large satisfactory” when taking into account the inventory build-up from engineless jets.

Airbus is aiming to achieve a monthly A320neo production rate of 75 aircraft in 2027.

Although the airframer has been reluctant to give details on progress with rates, Scherer says it is “just cruising past” a figure of 60 per month.

“Those things come and go, depending on the supply issues, or waves of supply, but we’re trending in the right direction [into] the 60s.”

Scherer says the “overall disturbance” in the supply chain across Airbus’s programmes – which, at times, amounted to “thousands of missing parts” – has “abated largely – not gone, but improved significantly”.

But there remains a constraint on widebody production from cabin items, specifically lavatory modules for the A350 which are being manufactured by Safran in Mexico.

“You can’t really build an airplane without toilets,” says Scherer. “That’s the bottleneck right now.”