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The Future Airbuses
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Can you remember back to mid-1969?
Boeing had just recently flown their first 747, 727s were coming off the line in droves and both McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed were well advanced with their new generation trijets. Over in Europe a consortium of Europe’s most capable aerospace manufacturers had teamed to produce an all-new twinjet like none ever seen before. Airbus was its name and at the time it was the subject of much scorn from the other side of the Atlantic where the ‘real’ airliners were bred.
It is now almost ten years since the first A300 embarked upon its maiden flight and today the major share of the widebodied civil airliner market lies squarely between Seattle and Toulouse. McDonnell Douglas struggles to keep the DC-10 alive while Lockheed has said goodbye to their once-promising Tristar.
It is impossible to forget how slowly Airbus sales were logged in those early years. From the early to mid-seventies, it appeared indeed that the pundits of North America were right in their lack of confidence in Europe’s ability to produce a first-class working airliner. By the 1977 Paris Air Show however, things had begun to get better, largely as a result of the first group of aircraft being operated commercially by Air Force and Lufthansa. The A300 and Airbus Industrie had well and truly arrived.
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