Mr. Asam, many people do not associate flying with joy.

There are flight cancellations and long queues.

How bad is chaos hurting your industry?

Timo Kotowski

Editor in Business.

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Niklas Zaboji

Economic correspondent in Paris

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First of all, it can be observed that air traffic is recovering strongly from the Corona crash.

First of all, it is positive that passengers are coming back and that our airline customers have their hands full.

Now everyone has to make an effort to properly deal with the aftermath of the pandemic.

We see in ourselves that it takes extremely great effort to get back to the old level of production.

There are those who say: after personnel, new aircraft are the next bottleneck.

Your rival Boeing reports significant delays in some model series.

Are planes becoming scarce?

That depends on the type of aircraft.

For medium-haul jets from the A320 series, we are actually sold out until 2027.

Talks are already underway about deliveries in the 2030s.

There are shortages, production rates cannot increase as fast as we had hoped.

For the long haul, things look different.

There are enough planes on the market here.

Here we see a high need for fleet renewal in the second half of the decade, and we are already conducting rate ramp-up studies with our suppliers.

Due to a lack of engines, you have not been able to deliver many aircraft on time for months.

How problematic are the delivery bottlenecks, how big is the damage for Airbus?

At the end of June we had 26 aircraft that could not be delivered due to missing engines.

The engine manufacturers were initially convinced that the production rates announced by Airbus were too ambitious.

In the meantime, the insight has grown.

The current demand shows that a rate of 75 medium-haul aircraft per month, which we want to achieve in 2025, is a condition sine qua non for being able to serve the market properly.

Is there at least an improvement in the supply bottlenecks in sight?

Yes.

The engine manufacturers are rethinking, we have drawn up plans with them to achieve the promised deliveries for the next three years.

This has already made great progress.

But manufacturers are still behind on their commitments.

This is not just about engines that Airbus needs for new aircraft, but also about replacement engines that airlines need to keep their fleets in operation.

You confirmed your production target for 2025, but you had to postpone that for 2023 to 2024 because of the bottlenecks.

Will the missing engines ultimately delay the recovery from the corona slump?

We believe air travel will fully recover between 2023 and 2025.

Nothing changed about that.

In short and medium-haul traffic, we're not far off, on long-haul routes it may take a little longer.

This will not correlate one-to-one with our deliveries.

We delivered 863 aircraft in the year leading up to the pandemic, with the new production rate the return to that level is likely to slow down a bit, although not massively.

How secure is your raw material supply?

Since the Russian attack on Ukraine, it has always been said that your titanium stocks will only last for the short and medium term.

We have a lot of titanium in stock.

So far, we have obtained certain components made of this material exclusively from Russia. Now we are taking care of opening up and certifying other sources.

This is in full swing.

Just keep in mind that the two long-haul aircraft makers are titanium's biggest buyers.

Our A350, for example, consists of 14 percent titanium.

However, Boeing and we are still producing at lower rates than before the pandemic.

Luckily this puts us in a situation where we use a lot less titanium than we used to.