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TAA And The Airbus
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When the Chairman of the Australian National Airlines Commission (Sir Robert Law-Smith) and the regional sales manager for Airbus Industrie of Toulouse (Mr Hugh Tansley) signed the order for four Airbus A300-84s and two options on December 10, they climaxed an effort of wills that began back in 1966/7. In its way, that typifies the situation in the modern airline industry. It takes years and years to get a new aircraft under way and years an years to sell it to customers you had in mind when you first thought of it.
Little more than 40 years ago, you could, as de Havilland did in the mid-1930s, think of, design, make, develop and put into operation a new airliner such as the four-engined DH86 in a few months. Even after WW II it took only a year or two to get the Convair 240 going and earning.
TAA’s first contact with what became the Airbus occurred in 1967, believe it or not, when the Director of Engineering, Mr John L. Watkins, called on the Sales Manager at Hatfield, Mr John M. Warner. That was the old de Havilland offices, DH having by then been taken into the Hawker Siddeley merger. Mr Warner had been a working engineer with BEA and DH before going into sales and had learned a lot trying to sell the relatively unsaleable Trident. He and Mr Watkins were old buddies, for at one stage TAA was very close to buying the Trident, which is often forgotten these days.
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