Installation of wing jigs for the Bombardier CSeries has begun at the airframer's Belfast facility in Northern Ireland.

The Belfast plant is responsible for the CS100 and CS300 composite wings and flight-control surfaces, and the jigs will be used to assemble the main wing box components.

Bombardier Aerospace Belfast general manager Michael Ryan said: "The jigs are highly automated and will allow us to control the assembly of the wings with a high degree of precision.

"We already installed a specially designed assembly jig to produce a pre-production wing technology demonstrator, and are now applying what we have learned from this to the actual production assembly jigs."

 CSeries wing jigs
 © Bombardier

Bombardier carried out ultimate load testing on the pre-production CSeries wing last year, and production of wings for the type is scheduled to start later this year.

It completed the first phase of its new composite component facility towards the end of 2010.

Source: Air Transport Intelligence news