Airbus aerostructures supplier Aerolia has received the 500th shipset of nose landing gear bays for the A320 series from Russia’s Irkut. The landmark was celebrated on Tuesday at the MAKS airshow in Moscow. Irkut has been supplying structures and systems to Airbus since 2004 with work packages including keel beams, flap tracks and landing gear bays. Since 2009 it has been supplying the latter to Aerolia, when the France-based group took over responsibility for this aspect of A320 production.

Separately, Airbus also announced the launch of a new sustainable aviation fuel initiative at the MAKS show. It will be working with Russia’s RT-Biotekhprom (known as the Rostec Group) to conduct a large-scale analysis of Russian feedstock with a view to determining how viable this might be as a base material for making sustainable aircraft fuel.