How a European consortium's slow-selling A300 grew into the world's biggest airliner maker
Airbus's first jet, the A300, sold so poorly in the 1970s that some wanted the whole programme scrapped. A rule change letting twin-engine planes fly further from airports rescued it, and by 2019 the company had become the world's largest builder of airliners, overtaking its American rival.
It began in 1970 as a consortium of European aerospace firms determined to build a wide-body plane that could compete with American airliners. The A300 of 1972 was the first wide-body jet with only two engines. Its break came in 1976, when the ETOPS 90 rule allowed twinjets to fly up to 90 minutes from the nearest airport instead of 60, so the A300 could finally cross oceans such as the North Atlantic and the Indian.
Each later model added something. The A310 introduced a glass cockpit that made the flight engineer unnecessary. The narrow-body A320, launched in 1987, was the first airliner steered by digital fly-by-wire, and because every later Airbus shares a similar cockpit, pilots can switch types more easily. In October 2025 the A320 passed the Boeing 737 as the most delivered airliner ever. The A350 of 2015 was the company's first plane built largely from carbon-fibre composites.
Not every bet paid. The double-deck A380, introduced in 2005 as the world's largest passenger jet, was meant to challenge the Boeing 747, but huge development costs and high running costs kept sales low, and production ended in December 2021. By contrast, taking over Bombardier's CSeries in 2018 handed it a ready-made small jet, rebranded the A220.
Corporate history is equally tangled. In 2000 the French, German and Spanish parents merged into EADS, which bought out the consortium and renamed itself Airbus in 2015. The legal seat is in Leiden in the Netherlands, while managers work from Blagnac, next to Toulouse. Beyond airliners it leads the world in helicopters, builds A400M military transports and tanker conversions, and co-owns ventures behind the Ariane rocket and the Eurofighter Typhoon.
Source: Airbus
