Airbus to recruit 13,000 new employees in 2023 to meet demand

European planemaker Airbus is set to recruit another 13,000 workers in 2023, of which 9,000 jobs would be based in Europe and remaining spread across operations in the U.S. and China. Will Boeing follow suit?

“We are seeing a very strong rebound in travel,” AerCap Chief Executive Aengus Kelly said “I think we will see a full return to 2019 in the middle of the year.” As of December 31, 2022:

• Airbus backlog 7,239 including 567 widebody
• Boeing backlog 4,578 including 847 widebody

Airbus’s newly hired workforce will include software engineers, cloud computing experts, customer engineers, hydrogen engineers, material technicians, operators, data analysts, cyber security experts, robotics experts, and many others. In 2022, the company also added 13,000 jobs to accelerate production of its commercial jets, recover from escalating delivery delays and meet new aircraft demands.

Chief Customer Officer Christian Scherer had outlined that airlines have been pushing to secure narrowbody planes as Airbus’s best-selling family of jets, the A320neo, is mostly sold out through 2029. Regarding backlog, Airbus’s total delivery figures came in below expectations with 661 aircraft delivered in 2022, 59 lower than the company initially intended to deliver.

Supply chain struggles have added fuel to the problem: a dearth of workers, raw-material shortages and disruption at factories in China because of COVID outbreaks.