Jinling Shipyard, a major Chinese ship manufacturer, today launched a huge roll-on and roll-off vessel for the shipment of Airbus A380 aircraft components. The 5,200-dwt vessel measures 154.15 metres long, 24 metres wide and 21.85 metres deep and features the largest ever watertight stern door (22 meters by 14 meters) on a Roll-On, Roll-Off vessel. It has a cargo deck space 6,720 square meters and holds as much as 1,805 lanes meters.

Airbus will use it for the transportation of A380 aircraft sections from its sites in Broughton U.K., Hamburg, Germany, Puerto Real, Spain, and Saint Nazaire, France to the final assembly line in Toulouse.
The vessel is commissioned by F.R.E.T./ Cetam, a subsidiary of Louis Dreyfus Armateurs of France and Leif Hoegh of Norway, and chartered by Airbus for A380 section transportation.

The Nanjing-based Jinling Shipyard won the shipbuilding contract in March 2002 in Paris, after emerging from competitions with Spanish and Republic of Korea (ROK) shipbuilding companies. It will be delivered in March 2004.

This contract enables the Jinling Shipyard to join the list of Airbus’s industry partners in China, which mainly include AVIC facilities in Shenyang, Xi’an, Chengdu, Guizhou that are manufacturing Airbus parts like wing components, passenger doors and maintenance tools. Since 1985, total value of projects subcontracted by Airbus to Chinese manufacturers has exceeded US $ 500 million, $ 380 million of which have gone to AVIC I companies.

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, Germany, 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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