Beijing, Oct 29 (PTI) Airbus has delivered its 500th A320 family aircraft from its final assembly line in north China's Tianjin, Airbus China announced Thursday.

The A320neo aeroplane was delivered to China Southern Airlines, a leading airline carrier in the country.

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George Xu, CEO of Airbus China, said the aircraft's delivery marked a milestone in industrial cooperation and partnership between Airbus and China's aviation industry.

In 2008, a joint venture of the A320 final assembly line was set up in Tianjin to meet surging demand from Chinese customers. It is the third location of Airbus's A320 family production facility and first outside Europe. It delivered its first A320 aircraft in 2009.

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China is the largest single-country market for Airbus, accounting for about one-fifth of its global deliveries, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

"It took our Tianjin final assembly line four years to deliver the first 100 A320 family aircraft, while from the 400th aircraft to the 500th, it only took two years,” Xu said.

China maintained the world's second-largest civil aviation market, with 660 million passenger trips in 2019, a year-on-year increase of 7.9 per cent, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), Xinhua report said.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)