Airbus A321XLR: An exclusive look at Air Canada’s new narrowbody ‘game-changer’   

The immense Airbus manufacturing site in Hamburg, Germany, is a city unto itself. Several of the 18,000 employees who work here refer to it as a “town within a town,” with low-slung office buildings set on modern cobbled roads, near spotless aircraft hangars, cacophonous assembly lines, restaurants, cafeterias, and—naturally—an adjoining airport. 

“Only the hairdresser is missing,” an Airbus staffer joked on a tour in early April, where Skies was the only Canadian aviation publication with exclusive, behind-the-scenes access. 

Hamburg is the second-largest Airbus factory in Europe, after the facility in Toulouse, France, that also holds the company’s Commercial Aircraft headquarters. Its nearly 100 buildings…