Most commercial airplanes are built in a surprisingly small number of cities. The two largest manufacturers, Boeing and Airbus, assemble their jets across a handful of massive factories in the United States, France, Germany, and China. But the full picture extends well beyond those two companies, with business jets, regional aircraft, and smaller planes coming together in locations from Savannah, Georgia to Montreal, Canada to Shanghai, China.
Boeing’s Assembly Plants in Washington and South Carolina
Boeing, the largest American aircraft manufacturer, operates its primary assembly facilities in Washington State. The Boeing Everett Factory in Everett, Washington is the world’s largest building by volume, covering 4.3 million square feet with 472 million cubic feet of interior space. Originally built in 1967 for the 747 jumbo jet, the Everett facility has been expanded multiple times and currently produces the 777 freighter. It’s also being retooled for the next-generation 777X, with the 777-9 variant in production. As of January 2026, Boeing began staffing a new 737 MAX 10 production line at Everett as well.
Boeing’s 737 MAX, the company’s best-selling airplane, is primarily assembled at the Boeing Renton Factory, also in Washington State. The Everett MAX line will serve as a fourth production line to help meet demand.
The 787 Dreamliner has a different home. Boeing consolidated all 787 production at its facility in North Charleston, South Carolina, completing the move from Everett in February 2021. This gave Boeing two geographically separate assembly hubs: the Seattle-area plants in Washington for the 737 and 777 families, and Charleston for the 787.
Airbus Factories Across Four Countries
Airbus operates ten Final Assembly Lines spread across four countries. Four are in Hamburg, Germany. Two are in Toulouse, France, where Airbus is headquartered. Two are in Mobile, Alabama, making it the company’s U.S. production base. And two are in Tianjin, China, with the second A320 family line there opening in 2025.
The A320 family, which includes the popular A320neo and A321neo, is Airbus’s highest-volume product. In 2024, Airbus delivered 602 A320 family aircraft alone, out of 766 total commercial deliveries to 86 customers worldwide. The wide-body A330 and A350 lines account for a smaller share, with 32 and 57 deliveries respectively that year. The smaller A220 family added another 75.
China’s Homegrown Competitor
China is no longer just a site for Western manufacturers. COMAC, the state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, assembles its C919 narrow-body jet in Shanghai’s Pudong district. The C919 is designed to compete directly with the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320. COMAC is expanding its Shanghai production facilities, with a new construction area of 330,000 square meters, as it works to fulfill hundreds of orders from Chinese airlines.
Business Jets: Savannah and Montreal
The business jet world has its own geography. Gulfstream Aerospace, owned by General Dynamics, is based in Savannah, Georgia, where it has manufactured civilian aircraft since 1967. The company has produced more than 2,000 aircraft and employs thousands of workers across eleven major locations, with Savannah and Brunswick, Georgia serving as its primary hubs. Over the years, Gulfstream has steadily expanded its Savannah campus with new manufacturing buildings, paint hangars, service centers, and research facilities.
Bombardier, the Canadian manufacturer known for its Challenger and Global series business jets, builds aircraft at facilities centered around Montreal, Quebec. The company recently announced a $100 million expansion of its manufacturing footprint in Dorval (a Montreal borough), adding a new manufacturing center near its existing Challenger assembly and completion facilities. Bombardier’s production network also includes sites in the United States and Mexico.
Wichita: The Air Capital of the World
Wichita, Kansas holds a unique place in aviation. The city earned the nickname “Air Capital of the World” thanks to a concentration of aircraft companies that dates back to the 1920s, when Lloyd Stearman, Walter Beech, and Clyde Cessna all established operations there. Cessna Aircraft Company formed in 1927, Beechcraft in 1932, and the legacy stuck. Today, Textron Aviation is headquartered in Wichita, manufacturing Cessna and Beechcraft planes for general aviation and business use.
Wichita is also home to Spirit AeroSystems, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of aircraft structures. Spirit doesn’t build complete airplanes, but it produces critical components that go into them: fuselage sections, wing structures, and pylons, all built at its Wichita facility using advanced composite and metal fabrication. These parts ship to Boeing and Airbus for final assembly, making Wichita a central node in the global supply chain even though finished jets don’t roll off the line there.
How the Supply Chain Connects It All
No airplane is built entirely in one place. Final assembly, where a complete aircraft comes together, happens at the factories described above. But the components arriving at those factories come from all over the world. Wings, fuselage panels, landing gear, avionics, and interiors are manufactured by hundreds of suppliers in dozens of countries before converging on a single assembly line.
Engines alone involve their own network of specialized plants. GE Aerospace assembles jet engines at facilities in Cincinnati and Peebles, Ohio, as well as Durham, North Carolina and Lynn, Massachusetts. Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney operate similarly distributed manufacturing networks in the U.K., the U.S., and elsewhere. A single engine can contain parts sourced from multiple continents before it’s bolted onto a wing in Everett or Toulouse.
The result is that while “where airplanes are built” has a short answer (a few major cities), the real manufacturing footprint is global. Final assembly is concentrated in roughly a dozen facilities worldwide, but the supply chains feeding those facilities reach into virtually every industrialized country on Earth.