Airbus has laid the first corner stone for a new Airbus Single-Aisle Maintenance Training Centre (AMTC) in Hamburg, Germany. Patrick Gavin, Executive Vice President Customer Services, and Hans-Joachim Gante, General Manager of Airbus Deutschland, symbolically started con-struction work on the new building in the presence of Gunnar Uldall, Senator of Economic and Labour Affairs, Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, and Gerhard Puttfarcken, Senior Vice President Single-Aisle Programme.

The AMTC, located at the Ruesch Peninsula near the Airbus engineering and manufacturing site in Hamburg-Finkenwerder, will accommodate maintenance trainees from single-aisle cus-tomer airlines and from the manufacturing organisation, who will undergo courses on the Airbus single-aisle product range. The AMTC will be a two-story building with 12 classrooms, where 20 Airbus instructors and 12 support staff will be available to an average of 110 trainees per day. The building will be completed by September 2003, and training will commence three months later.

On the occasion, Patrick Gavin said: “Airbus will face the training activity growth by expanding training facilities. The new single-aisle maintenance training centre in Hamburg will provide ex-cellent opportunities for maintenance personnel, who need “hands-on” experience on our sin-gle-aisle aircraft that are assembled here.”

This maintenance training centre comes in addition to the main Airbus Training Centre in Tou-louse, and those in Miami and Beijing, and broadens Airbus’ global maintenance training capa-bilities.

Hans-Joachim Gante added: “Establishing the AMTC here in Finkenwerder enlarges Hamburg’s role as centre of competence for the Airbus single-aisle product range by entering into a new field of activity.”

A leading aircraft manufacturer with the most modern and comprehensive product line on the market, Airbus is a global company with design and manufacturing facilities in France, Ger-many, the UK, and Spain as well as subsidiaries in the U.S., China and Japan. Headquartered in Toulouse, France, Airbus is an EADS joint Company with BAE SYSTEMS.
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