Millions more protective face masks have been flown from China to Europe today by Airbus

An Airbus flight test crew has just completed its latest mission with an A350-1000 test aircraft, the jet returned to France with a cargo of 4 million face masks earlier today, Sunday April 5.

It’s the third mission to China bringing large quantities of surgical masks to support health systems, including the NHS in their fight against COVID-19.

So far, Airbus has brought around six million protective face masks to Europe from China as part of its ‘air-bridge mission’ during the coronavirus pandemic.

The first UK consignment of face masks arrived at Broughton from Airbus’ HQ in Toulouse, France late last week.

On Friday, more than 400,000 surgical masks, donated by Airbus to the NHS, were collected from Airbus’ Broughton plant.

Tony Chatfield, Head of Supply Chain, Clinical Logistics & Transport NHS Wales thanked Airbus, and said:

“Within hours of our NHS Wales Health Courier Service collecting them from Airbus they were distributed to NHS sites across Wales, Diolch yn fawr.”

Broughton | @Airbus has donated more than 400,000 surgical masks to the #NHS to help in the fight against #COVID19. Another of our jets is picking up more masks from China this weekend ready to distribute across Europe. pic.twitter.com/Bf4gmOjXD7

— Airbus In The UK (@AirbusintheUK) April 4, 2020

“I would like to pay tribute to all the Airbus teams, globally, supporting the fight against COVID-19. They’re living our values in assisting those who are saving lives every day”, said Guillaume Faury, Airbus CEO. ”

VentilatorChallengeUK

Airbus has teamed up with a number of other manufacturing companies to create a consortium which to help in the country’s fight against COVID-19 by manufacturing more than 10,000 new ventilator units for the NHS.

The consortium is working in partnership with the Welsh Government to create a production facility for ventilators at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre on Chester Road in Broughton.

The production line will be up and running before the Easter weekend.

Due to the urgent need for ventilators, production will take place round the clock with more than 500 employees working shifts – 125 per shift – to ensure they can manufacture, test and distribute units to the front line as quickly as possible.

The VentilatorChallengeUK consortium includes AMRC Cymru anchor tenant Airbus, along with BAE systems, Rolls Royce, GKN Aerospace and Siemens UK among others, who have taken many of their best people from key projects and dedicated significant resources to serve the national need.