Well, it’s time for another wall of text. Get ready, folks. Today, we’re doing part two of the Three Body Problem.
Today’s topic was, as we learned, was the winner of the trijet competition by instantly rendering its competitors obsolete – the Airbus A300. We saw last time that it took the newly introduced DC-10 and L-1011 and forever banished the trijet genre into irrelevance.
But this wasn’t quite the flawless victory that it seemed in our last episode. While the Lockheed L-1011 was a dismal sales failure at only 250 produced and sold, the A300 almost died at launch. It was a massive gamble that banked so much on so many variables, and this story almost ended as quickly as it started. Today, we’re going to visit what almost wasn’t – Airbus, and the European dream.
We already know the impact of the widebody revolution. Boeing had shrunk the world with the 747, making air travel affordable to the masses thanks to its unrivaled capacity. And a few pages back, we learned that in the 1960s, American Airlines wanted to expand the widebody market by filling the niche between narrow bodies and the 747. But this potentially lucrative sector wasn’t of much concern to Airbus. Mostly because back then, Airbus didn’t actually exist.
A Sud Aviation Caravelle, one of many low volume airliners to come out Europe in the 1950s.
Despite introducing jet airliners to the world in the 1950s with the introduction of the DeHavilland Comet, manufacturers like Hawker-Siddeley or Sud Aviation were very rapidly eclipsed in terms of production output by Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas. By the mid-1960s, their lead had evaporated entirely. Nearly 80% of all airliners in service by mid-decade were built in America. And with the 747 slated to enter service by 1970, it seemed like there was no stopping the American Machine. Dassault, BAC, Fokker and Messerschmitt – all once-iconic names in the industry – were poised to disappear forever.
But another solution, under another name, was already in the works. Under an Anglo-French treaty, BAC and Sud Aviation had been working together on the Concorde since 1962. The secret to Airbus wouldn’t be in the delta planform, or the monstrous Olympus engines that powered it. Instead, it was in the treaty. Neither BAC nor Sud Aviation would’ve been able to build such a machine on their own (and even then, they had limitations – the Concorde’s Mach 2 limit wasn’t dictated by of a lack of power, but because neither company had experience with high-heat metals required if they wanted to go faster).
The Concorde - still one of the most imposing planes ever made
But despite pulling off one of the most significant engineering feats of the century, speed wasn’t where the money was. The 747 hadn’t even entered service yet, and they were selling like hotcakes compared to the paltry 20 Concordes that would ever be made. If any European manufacturer wanted to stand a chance, they’d have to build a widebody, and they’d have to do it better than the Americans. Every manufacturer in the continent was busy sketching their own designs – air buses, as they became referred to. But to compete, they needed to sell volumes. And they couldn’t do that at each other’s throats.
On September 26, 1967, the British, French, and West German governments signed a memorandum of understanding to build a new airliner called the A300. Each country would pool their aerospace expertise, and each would provide a different part of the aircraft – Germany made the fuselage, France made the cockpit and control heads, and Britain made the wings. The Dutch would join in to take charge of the control surfaces, while Spain created the empennage (tailplane). The British would withdraw from the program in 1969 out of fear for lack of sales, but Hawker-Siddeley would remain as the provider of the wings for the duration of the project.
The early Airbus assembly in Toulouse, France - date unkown
The challenge of building a plane over several different countries, is that all the parts are built via telephone, leaving the problem of joining them up to be much like finishing a Lego set if you had to order it brick by brick in five languages. With entire wings built in Britain or
the entire goddamn body being built in Germany, getting each piece together would be a challenge. While companies like Boeing still had to ship parts between plants, they also had the uniquely American luxury of building entire facilities wherever they pleased, like setting up an entire private airport in Washington just to build the 747.
Entire segments of the A300 would not only have to be shipped to Toulouse, France, but it all had to be done in sequence. In order to pull some of it off, whatever couldn’t be loaded by road or rail would need to be flown in with specially modified Boeing Stratocruisers (affectionately called the Super Guppy). With Airbus pulling off some incredible trickery in logistics (seriously, some people have trouble getting cars through some European cities, let alone an airliner) The A300, at long last, came together piece by piece for its debut on October 28, 1972.
One such Super Guppy after Airbus had sold it off
Now, remember what I said about the L-1011 being the most advanced airliner of its time? It really was, don’t get me wrong. But it took just two years for Airbus to throw all that out the window. Like Lockheed, Airbus had innovated to extremes – the first composite structure of any airliner, an avionics suite to make the L-1011 blush, and the first supercritical wing on any airliner (I’ll spare you the engineering explanation – it allowed the A300 to outclimb any of its competitors, and improved fuel efficiency). On top of all this, the A300 had smarter design features such as a higher load floor, maximizing cargo space in the belly without sacrificing passenger space.
But a well-designed plane wasn’t enough on its own. Not only were most airliners in service built by Americans, they were operated by them as well. In order to sell to their target audience, they had to convince Americans that foreigners had a superior product. Any of you paying attention to US politics or the 2008 auto industry collapse will know what they were up against. To appease the Americans, the plane was designed using Imperial measurements, and all operating materials were in English. Under the wings of F-OCAZ (serial number 1), two all-American General Electric turbofans provided power, with the option for equally American Pratt & Whitney JT6 units (or the troubled Rolls-Royce RB211, but that’s a minor detail). And despite the Eurocentric construction, nearly a third of the A300 was made of American components.
But it didn’t work.
For one, Airbus had run into the same problem as Lockheed – names like Dassault and CASA had clout, to be sure, but this new “Airbus” was nothing more than a government experiment with no track record. None of its founding companies had built a project of this scale, and there were doubts that such a company would survive, say, one of their member countries deciding to pack up and leave. Air France had bought a few examples, sure, but this was a project sponsored by the French government.
Of course they would blindly buy their own work, said the Americans without a hint of irony. The Americans remained thoroughly unimpressed with the A300, with the VP of Boeing deriding the effort:
“
A typical government airplane. They’ll build a dozen or so and then go out of business.”
-Jim Austin, Boeing Vice President on the Airbus A300
And by 1977, it seemed that Mr. Austin was right.
Airbus A300 serial one - a demonstrator aircraft T/N F-OCAZ
