Airbus Industrie has come a long way since its first aircraft, the A300, took to the air 25 years ago this week, on 28 October, 1972. What was once regarded as something of a curiosity by its rivals across the Atlantic has emerged as the only world challenger to the US airliner industry. The consortium has also emerged as Europe's best hope of a flagship around which to restructure its fragmented aerospace industry, both civil and military.
The figures speak for themselves. From a standing start in the early 1970s, Airbus has to date accumulated orders for almost 2,500 aircraft and built up a portfolio of some 138 customers. More than 1,600 have been delivered since the first handful of A300s made their way out of the production hangar from Toulouse in 1974 bound for launch customer Air France.
The often-acrimonious transatlantic trade battles which are now a regular feature of the large-civil-aircraft market are themselves testament to the presence which Airbus has built up, not least in the calculations of its US competitor.
It was not always so. Tales abound in Toulouse about the polite condescension with which the then-established US civil players - Boeing, McDonnell Douglas (MDC) and Lockheed - greeted their would-be European rival.
Their scepticism initially appeared to be justified as Airbus struggled to build up a customer base for its widebody twin over its early years. Having opened its orderbook in 1970 with Air France, the consortium was taking in orders for the A300 at an average of no more than five or six units a year in a depressed market. By 1976, the flow had virtually dried up.
Then the tide started to turn. Markets began to boom and Airbus boomed with them, securing important Asian customers, signing up Eastern Air Lines as its first US carrier, and capturing a 20% share of new orders at the height.
By the time the next boom was taking off, in the late 1980s, Airbus had built up a coherent range of new-generation fly-by-wire aircraft spearheaded by the A320 narrowbody family and later the newly launched A330/A340 widebodies. US competitors were forced to take the newcomer seriously.
Lockheed had already bowed out of the race and, by the recession of the early 1990s, MDC was beginning to feel the stress of keeping pace, leaving a two-horse race between Airbus and Boeing. Perhaps ironically, MDC's mid-year merger with Boeing, which has caused so much anxiety in Europe, was also the final confirmation that Airbus had won the battle to establish itself as the world's second force.
Airbus has never made a secret of its longer-term ambition to draw level with Boeing sometime early in the next century. Just how close it is to achieving that goal is more than a little controversial, given the bitter arguments over market-share data between the two protagonists.
On raw manufacturer data, Airbus undeniably has taken one-third of the market for aircraft over 100 seats - which roughly corresponds to the share once enjoyed by MDC. On its own reading of the firm order books Airbus claims that its share is already at around 40%.
Whatever the market-share data, there are at least two pieces of unfinished business which Airbus must now tackle as it enters the next century. First comes the launch of the A3XX, pencilled in for the late 1998, which should at last give Airbus an answer to Boeing's highly lucrative 747 monopoly.
Next is the transformation of Airbus from consortium into a stand-alone company, giving a control over production and finance that the consortium structure has lacked. When that process is complete, Airbus can genuinely claim to have come of age.
Source: Flight International
