

Not really. Airbus is working on several new designs, and these assembly lines could be repurposed. It’s a pretty riskless investment. Airbus wants to be able to ramp up production, but that is very, very hard to do. building and equiping the factory is the easy part. You have to train people in very complex and specific skills, create seniority scales and workforce structures, etc. and then comes the really, really hard thing, which is getting an already overstrained supply chain up to production levels required by the new line.
Not only that, they don’t have the production ability to fullfill 5% of China’s requirements for single aisle jets. Ryanair would be very far down the queue. It’s a classic O’ Leary bullshit announcement.
COMAC is aiming to increase production of the C919 to 75 planes a year. Airbus is aiming to increase production of the A320 to 75 planes a month