Birth of the Airbus Family: The A310

The Airbus A310 prototype takes flight on 3 April 1982.

In the days following the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War in Middle East in October that year, the oil producing nations of the Middle East responded to American materiel support of Israel with an oil embargo that sparked a worldwide economic crisis as the price of oil abruptly shot upwards from $3/barrel to over $12/barrel in a short period of time. As a result, the airline industry worldwide embraced fuel efficiency as the new driver for future aircraft designs. While there were high-bypass ratio turbofans that powered the new widebody designs that were entering service (Boeing 747, Douglas DC-10, and Lockheed L-1011 Tristar), turbojets and low-bypass ratio turbofans were still commonplace in the short to medium-haul fleets worldwide. Many airlines indicated to the major manufacturers that there was a market need for a fuel-efficient aircraft in the 150-200 seat range over short to medium haul ranges. Of the big three manufacturers in the United States who dominated the world commercial airliner market, Boeing's plans were the most ambitious with the launch of not just one aircraft, but two aircraft with a common cockpit with the Boeing 757 and 767. It was in many ways the biggest gamble Boeing had ever undertaken, bigger than building the Dash 80 demonstrator that led to the 707 and even bigger than the launch of the 747 ten years earlier. News of Boeing's plans put pressure on Airbus Industrie to respond as all it had produced by that point was the A300. While there were a range of A300 variants with varying engines, payload and fuel capacities, they were all still essentially the same aircraft and hardly a family of aircraft. Two of the primary founders of Airbus and their heads, Roger Béteille (technical director) and Henri Ziegler (general manager), strongly believed that Airbus needed to emulate Boeing's strategy of building a whole family of different aircraft for different markets if the whole enterprise was to have a future beyond the A300. Boeing's idea for commonality with the 757 and 767 designs resonated with the Airbus team who was commonality among varied designs as a way of proving value to the airline customers, not to mention it would be a strong incentive for an Airbus customer to stay loyal to Airbus in the future.

Part of the problem Béteille and Ziegler faced was that most of the Airbus consortium partners saw the A300 as the end result of cooperation instead of the starting point for future cooperation. A lot of that was driven by the atmosphere of fiscal austerity of the 1970s in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis- Airbus' partner nations were hesitant of putting up more money into the venture, particularly when Airbus was still a bit player on the world market despite the success of the A300. In 1978, for example, Airbus delivered 15 aircraft, all of them A300s. That same year Boeing delivered 203 aircraft across three product lines- the 727, 737, and 747. In fact, it wouldn't be until 2003 that Airbus would deliver more aircraft in a single year than Boeing. When Boeing launched the 757 and 767 programs, they were also capitalizing on market vulnerabilities experienced by McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed in the wake of their trijet programs- Airbus wasn't really on Boeing's radar screen at the time. Despite the market effects on McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed, they were still delivering aircraft as well which were entering service on top of Boeing's numbers. You can imagine what a tall order it was for Béteille and Ziegler to convince the Airbus consortium partners that there was value and potential for the long haul beyond the A300 at a time when they were only building less than 5% of the world's commercial jetliners. It wasn't until mid-1975 that the board of Airbus Industrie endorsed the plan for a family of aircraft- and that endorsement is a testament to the persuasive powers of Roger Béteille and Henri Ziegler. In his book Close to the Sun: How Airbus Challenged America's Dominance of the Skies, author Stephen Aris calls that 1975 decision as the most critical decision in Airbus' history. If Airbus failed, then it was only one aircraft, the A300, that failed. But if they became successful, then that one aircraft wouldn't be enough. The leadership of Airbus Industrie by that point had proven themselves remarkably adept in getting the A300 into production and to market while balancing the interests of the partner nations in the consortium. 

Winning a Swissair order was a strategic priority for Airbus

With the backing of the consortium to expand the Airbus product line beyond the A300, the next task at hand was to determine the configuration of the new addition. The first iteration dated back to the oil crisis of 1973 when A300 sales were near dormant (only four A300s were delivered in 1974). In response to what was seen as an evolving market for something smaller than the A300, what was designated the B10 was a minimum-change variant of the A300 that had a shorter fuselage but the same wing and empennage as the larger aircraft. However, the B10 proposal created a significant amount of discord at all levels of Airbus as the consortium partners argued whether it was needed or not. Lufthansa in particular was keen for a smaller A300 derivative and this had gotten the support of Swissair. In those days, Swissair was one of those flagship customers every commercial airframe builder wanted as a customer. They were a tough customer known to be one of the most difficult airlines to negotiate with- but a Swissair order was badge of prestige for any commercial aircraft design and with Swissair now allying with Lufthansa on interest for a smaller A300 derivative, winning Swissair as a launch customer soon became one of Airbus' primary strategic goals. 

By the time the two airlines were briefed on the B10 proposal, Boeing was well on its way to launching the 757/767 program and compared to those aircraft, the B10 had no fans with either Lufthansa or Swissair. Their objections of the proposal stemmed from two points- the first one was that by the time of proposed service entry, the B10 design would be based on technology and a design that was at least a decade old and more importantly, it had a worse payload fraction than the A300. The payload fraction is one way of measuring an aircraft's efficiency- how much payload can it carry compared to its weight. Since the B10 design had a shorter fuselage married to the A300's wings, it had less passengers (therefore less revenue) to offset the costs of carrying a heavier wing structure. This is one of the reasons why shrinks of commercial airframes tend to not do well in the market- like the A318, 737-500, or 747SP, for example. If the B10 proposal was ever going to get off the drawing board, it needed a lighter wing and whole host of improvements over the A300 to win over the airlines who were being offered the latest in technology with the 757/767. In an unusual twist of history, the prospect of trans-Atlantic cooperation offered an potential answer to Airbus' dilemma. Why not combine Airbus' growing widebody fuselage expertise with the technology and industrial muscle of the United States? The first feelers on such an idea came from McDonnell Douglas in the spring of 1975 for a joint venture for a 200-seat design called the DC-X-200. McDonnell Douglas had long been considering a twin-engine version of the DC-10 and the DC-X-200 was the latest iteration along those lines. However, once discussions moved beyond engineering to management, the talks quickly collapsed. That summer another offer came from Boeing who thought there would be some synergies with the B10 proposal and the 767 program. Whether Boeing was serious or just trying to distract Airbus is still a source of debate to this day, but the proposal would have consisted of the A300-based fuselage and 767 wings and empennage. At the end of the day, however, Airbus lost interest as it became apparent that they would end up a Boeing subcontractor in the joint venture. 

Lufthansa was an early A300 customer who drove the design of the A310.

Still keen to win over Lufthansa and Swissair, Airbus decided to follow as Boeing had done with the 757/767 and go with a two-crew flight deck and CRT displays. That would prove to be a relatively easy step to take but it still provoked the ire of the pilots' unions of several European carriers. The need for a new wing, however proved to continue to be problematic. I had posted previously that it had taken the personal intervention of a German politician, Franz Josef Strauss, to fund the A300's wing development and construction by Hawker Siddeley as a result of the British government's withdrawal from the Airbus consortium. Hawker was still the center of the most advanced wing design work in Europe and was in the process of merging with several other entities to form British Aerospace (BAe). With British Aerospace being majority owned by the government, there was considerable anguish at Airbus as to whether or not BAe would participate in the B10 project given the British pull out of the Airbus consortium in 1969.  When Hawker elected to remain an Airbus participant despite the pullout, they had absorbed a portion of the costs of wing development. Now that Hawker was part of BAe, no one was sure that the new entity was willing to front such costs again for the B10 project. Airbus decided at that point to turn to its partners for a wing design- Aerospatiale and VFW-Fokker each submitted wing designs and Roger Béteille was sure that whoever was chosen, it would be the end of Airbus as the other partner would feel jilted. As it turned out, neither was chosen- the German design was aerodynamically superior but the French design was structurally superior. A joint-wing design center was established to combine their efforts and word of this got back to BAe quite quickly that their replacement was in the works. 

The exact political machinations in the UK that resulted will be the subject of a future blog article, but they were contentious with pro-Airbus factions in the British government and those who favored a joint-venture with Boeing on the 757. At the end of the day, however, BAe did end up designing and fabricating the wing which was not only lighter, but was of supercritical section which made it not only more aerodynamically efficient but also offset the smaller size with a deeper airfoil section which offered more fuel capacity. Getting the wing also meant that the British eventually rejoined the Airbus consortium with a 20% share. On 9 June 1978, Lufthansa and Swissair issued a joint specification for the new aircraft and within a month announced intentions of placing orders for what was launched as the Airbus A310. On 15 March 1979, Swissair announced its launch order for 10 aircraft and 10 options with plans to use the A310 as a replacement for its legacy DC-9 fleet on its major intra-European routes. Lufthansa quickly followed with an order for 10 aircraft and soon after Air France and Iberia also placed orders, assuring the production and success of the A310. When the A310 prototype flew, it would later wear Swissair's colors on the right side and Lufthansa's colors on the left side. Many of the advances of the A310 were later incorporated into an upgrade of the A300, the A300-600. 

Further reading: 

How American Airlines Shaped the A300

How Rolls Royce Scuttled British Participation in Airbus

The Early Days of Airbus Industrie and How the A300 Got Its Name

Franz Josef Strauss: The Bavarian Politician Who Saved Airbus
How a Lot of Airbus Jets Were Born on Boeing Wings

Related reading:

American Airlines Picks the DC-10 (American's pick of the DC-10 is intertwined with the early history of Airbus)

Source: Close to the Sun: How Airbus Challenged America's Domination of the Skies by Stephen Aris. Agate Books, 2002, pp 90-95. Photos: Wikipedia

How a Lot of Airbus Jets Were Born on Boeing Wings

A340 fuselage barrel being loaded into 377SGT No. 3

With the formation of Airbus Industrie and the launch of the Airbus A300 jetliner, the different consortium partners finalized their workshare of the project- the tail section was the responsibility of the Spanish, the British were responsible for the wings, the Dutch fabricated all the moving surfaces of the wing, the Germans built the forward and aft fuselage along with the top section of the center fuselage, and the French were responsible for the nose, flight deck, control systems, the lower section of the center fuselage and final assembly of the A300. Splitting up the construction of a commercial aircraft in this manner wasn't necessarily new to the aerospace industry- after all, Boeing had about 65% of the Boeing 747 farmed out to various subcontractors with over 20,000 companies in just about every one of the fifty US states and some foreign nations. But what was novel in what Airbus was doing was that it was the very heart of the enterprise with the partner nations assuming near-equal risk. This would be how every Airbus jet would be built and each partner nation would build their sections to as near complete as possible. For Boeing, they retained oversight and control over what their 747 subcontractors would be doing and providing. For the A300, each Airbus partner wasn't overseeing each other- they were more or less having to trust that each partner would provide a finished product that met the specifications and could be easily integrated into final assembly in France. This required each firm to work in near-perfect harmony and coordination with the other consortium members. There was no margin for error- it has been said that if a Swiss watch were scaled up to the same diameter as the A300's fuselage, the tolerances on the A300 were much tighter than that of the Swiss watch!

Parts were designed in such a way to facilitate this process, but other steps were necessary for proper coordination. At the Hawker Siddeley plant in the UK that built the wings, for example, they had special jigs that the wings could be "plugged" into that replicated the fuselage center section that they would join up with in the final assembly hall in Toulouse. More difficult was getting each nation to adopt the same production techniques. During the early days, engineers at Airbus joked how easy it was to tell whether a particular join in the aircraft was done by the French or Germans. But it had to work and with great perseverance, the A300 was coming to shape. 

Surprisingly, in the early days of Airbus, the biggest problem they faced in getting the A300 into production was the logistics of having factories in France, Germany, Spain, Great Britain and the Netherlands all separated by significant distances. The straight line distance from Germany's Hamburg production facility to the final assembly hall in Toulouse was 900 miles. It was originally planned that all the large sections would be transported by sea- this was why the German Airbus facilities were in Bremen and Hamburg which had easy sea access and the Hawker facility had good road links to the port at Liverpool. Toulouse, however, is about 100 miles inland with no sea access. The original plan was to transport the fuselage and wing sections up the Garonne River from Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast. Because of the depth of the river and the size of the components, they would only be able to up about 50 miles from Bordeaux at which point the components were transferred to a road convoy- to minimize disruption along the route to Toulouse, it had to be done at night and numerous telephone poles, trees and power lines would have to be relocated. Some of the transport vehicles would be near 100-feet in length and it wasn't long before Airbus officials came to their senses and realized that this was a very inefficient and time-consuming process to get airframe components to final assembly. 

Airbus Skylink, Felix Kracht's solution for Airbus' logistical problem

The A300 production manager was a German engineer named Felix Kracht. Before joining the nascent Airbus in 1968, Kracht had worked on harmonizing production methods and standards on the Franco-German C160 Transall military transport program. About the time that the A300 program had been launched, Kracht was familiar with Aero Spacelines and its founder, Jack Conroy. Aero Spacelines was established by Conroy to convert Boeing 377 Stratocruisers into outsize cargo transports for NASA. Not only did ASI design and convert the aircraft, they also operated the aircraft as well. The first conversion was done in 1962 using a retired Stratocruiser and was called the Pregnant Guppy which transported both Titan II stages for the Gemini program and Saturn stages for the Apollo program. By 1970 a bigger and more capable Guppy had made its first flight- longer and more capacious than any of Conroy's other designs, the new Super Guppy Turbine (377SGT) was turboprop-powered. The first 377SGT made its first flight after conversion on 24 August 1970 and the second 377SGT first flew on 24 August 1972. By this point, however, ASI was in financial trouble and that's where Felix Kracht and Airbus stepped into the picture. He astutely realized its capacious fuselage and swing-nose loading were the perfect solution to the logistical problem of getting large airframe sections to Toulouse for final assembly. In 1970, Kracht had arranged for Airbus to purchase the first 377SGT with delivery in 1971. The purchase deal included a contractual commitment from ASI to build a second 377SGT as a back up for Airbus to serve as a back up for the first 377SGT. With ASI in dire financial straits in 1973 as the Apollo program was winding down, Airbus purchased the second 377SGT built. Plans then evolved once A300 production had been launched for a third and fourth 377SGT to be built for Airbus. By this point ASI was in no position to complete construction of two more aircraft, but they did complete sub-assemblies which were then completed in France. The third 377SGT first flew in 1979 and the fourth and final 377SGT first flew in 1980. 

Operating the Super Guppy fleet wasn't cheap, but in terms of time savings and efficiency, the cost was worthwhile compared to any sea/ground-based transport option. As the battle with Boeing heated up in the late 1970s, Boeing criticized what was called the Airbus Skylink program but Airbus responded by overlying a map of Boeing's subcontractors over a map of the Airbus partners to show the distances flown by the Super Guppies was shorter than the distances from Boeing's subcontractors to final assembly in Seattle. By the 1980s, though, the age of the Super Guppy fleet was becoming a significant cost center for Airbus. In 1991, the French company Aerospatiale and the German company DASA formed a joint enterprise to develop and build a replacement for the venerable Super Guppy fleet, ironically based on the A300. Construction of the Airbus Beluga began in September 1992 with the first flight taking place in 1994. A total of five Belugas have been built with the last one completed in 1999 which allowed for the retirement of the Super Guppy fleet. 

377SGT No. 4, now N941NA operated by NASA

Super Guppy No. 1 was retired in 1996 and resides at the British Aviation Heritage Museum at Bruntingthorpe awaiting proper restoration. Super Guppy No. 2 was also retired in 1996 and is on display at the Airbus facility at Toulouse and is under the care of the group Ailes Anciennes Toulouse ("Toulouse Old Wings"). The Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace at Le Bourget was offered Super Guppy No. 2 initially, but they had to decline on account of space considerations. Super Guppy No. 3 was retired in 1997 and is on display at the Deutsche Airbus facility at Hamburg Finkenwerder, Germany. Super Guppy No. 4, however, continues to earn its keep, but no longer for Airbus. In an International Space Station barter agreement, Super Guppy No. 4 was transferred to NASA in exchange for delivery to the ISS by the Space Shuttle components from the European Space Agency. Now with tail number N941NA, the NASA Super Guppy transported ISS modules destined for in-orbit assembly and currently transports launch payloads. 

As an interesting note on Super Guppy No. 4/N941NA- when Aero Spacelines was building the sub-sections for Airbus, the company found that there were no more spare Boeing 377 Stratocruisers that could be cannibalized to form the lower aft fuselage. The dismantled original Pregnant Guppy that first flew in 1962 was still available and was purchased for its lower aft fuselage which was incorporated into Super Guppy No. 4/N941NA. Now here's what's interesting- the Pregnant Guppy was converted from the third Boeing Stratocruiser prototype that made its first flight in 1948! That means that not just a significant portion of Airbus jets produced made their "first flight" on the third Stratocruiser prototype (so to speak), but so did some of the modules of the ISS. 

Further reading: 

How American Airlines Shaped the A300

How Rolls Royce Scuttled British Participation in Airbus

The Early Days of Airbus Industrie and How the A300 Got Its Name

Franz Josef Strauss: The Bavarian Politician Who Saved Airbus

Related reading:

American Airlines Picks the DC-10 (American's pick of the DC-10 is intertwined with the early history of Airbus)

Sources: Close to the Sun: How Airbus Challenged America's Domination of the Skies by Stephen Aris. Agate Books, 2002, pp 56-62. "All About Guppys" at www.allaboutguppys.com. Photos: Wikipedia, Airbus.

Franz Josef Strauss: The Bavarian Politician Who Saved Airbus

Franz Josef Strauss in the cockpit of an Airbus

The early history of Airbus Industrie was very rocky indeed and I had posted previously how the failure of the planned Rolls Royce RB.207 engine nearly killed the A300 before it even flew. The breach of trust that opened up between Rolls Royce and Airbus was so large, over twenty years would elapse before a Rolls Royce engine was available on the Airbus aircraft- that was 1989 when Cathay Pacific Airlines specified the new Trent 700 engine for its A330s. Quite literally, the day after the French, British and German governments signed the agreement to create Airbus on 26 July 1968, the governments were getting a case of cold feet. For the French, that was the year the franc collapsed on the world currency markets and the French government began to have reservations about having three airline projects going on at once- Concorde, the Airbus A300, and the Dassault Mercure. It was clear that it was politically unfeasible to pull out of the Concorde program. Many French officials their faith in the 100% French program of the Dassault Mercure despite the protests of Airbus engineers that the Mercure would be a flop. That left Airbus on the cutting block. The redesign of the Airbus to a smaller aircraft to make off-the-shelf engines possible instead of the RB.207 saved the program as it cut the cost of the program and made it more appealing to potential customers- this was enough to give French officials cause to reconsider and not withdraw from Airbus. 

The British, however, were less than open-minded. In short, money had been put up to help with the launch of the BAC Three-Eleven which used two RB.211 engines. The smaller, redesigned A300 designated the A300B could now also use RB.211 engines, but that also put the new A300B square in competition with the BAC Three-Eleven. Lockheed and BAC were even in discussions on collaborating on the Three-Eleven and with the French economic malaise spreading through Europe, some in the British government wanted to put their bets on collaboration with the United States. Believe it or not, there was discussion by British officials about pulling out of Concorde, but again, like the French realized, that was politically unfeasible. That's not often realized that the British and French were considering pulling the plug on Concorde before it even made its first flight! 9 April 1969 was the first flight of the first British-built Concorde; on the day after, British officials met with their French counterparts to inform them the British were pulling out of Airbus. 

Karl Schiller, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs

British withdrawal from Airbus didn't come as a bolt out of the blue- the indications were there for over a year and the RB.207 fiasco made it clear that it was coming sooner rather than later. Earlier that year in 1969, the Germans made it known to the French that they would be willing to fill the gap in the Airbus consortium should the British pull out. At the time, the lion's share of the A300 was split between Great Britain and France with West Germany getting the remaining stake. Even though World War II had ended 25 years earlier, the German aircraft industry was still a hollow shell of its former self despite the consortium of seven German aircraft manufacturers that teamed together to form the West German contribution to Airbus. That the Germans were willing to step in to fill that possible gap is due to the efforts of two politicians. The first one was Karl Schiller, the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs. Schiller was a quiet, bespectacled economist that had made his name in West German politics focusing on rebuilding the economy. The other politician was more well-known, Franz Josef Strauss. Strauss was a boisterous Bavarian who never seemed to be far from scandal in German politics. In 1956, Strauss become the youngest defense minister in German history and was tasked with rebuilding the German military. The procurement of the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter for the Luftwaffe was contentious and a Lockheed lobbyist testified that he had paid $10 million in bribes to Strauss to select the Starfighter. During this time, Lockheed had gotten itself entangled with bribery allegations with several different aircraft procurement programs to gain sales of the Starfighter. Strauss filed a slander suit against the lobbyist, but since the allegations couldn't be corroborated, the issue was dropped. The German magazine Der Spiegel then accused Strauss of taking bribes in the construction of German military facilities. The resulting controversy resulted in Strauss stepping down for having the editor and owner of Der Spiegel arrested and held in retribution. Strauss's political career was all but over had it not been for the 1966 elections that resulted in a coalition government and Strauss being tapped to be Minister of the Treasury to work with Karl Schiller in growing the German economy. 

Both Strauss and Schiller were an interesting pair that had common goals of growing the German economy. Schiller was quiet, Strauss was loud. Schiller was dry and Strauss was animated. Both liked the idea of Airbus as a project to tie Europe together. Strauss in particular had a strong dislike of nationalism as he felt it was counterproductive to economic prosperity- having a central role in Airbus would not only benefit West Germany, it would also economically tie the nation to the rest of Europe for the greater good and keep nationalism from raising its ugly head again. Strauss was a long time supporter of the German aviation industry and he was a private pilot himself. When the Luftwaffe selected the F-104 Starfighter, he was instrumental in getting license production for German industry with Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB) building 260 F-104Gs for the Luftwaffe. Given Strauss's aviation connections, he was well aware of the British getting cold feet in 1969. Before the British pull out, Schiller and Strauss had sent ministers to France to let them know that if Britain were unwilling to support Airbus, the West German government was prepared to double its investment to as much as 50% of the program provided the French did the same. Given the economic climate of Europe at the time, that was an astoundingly generous offer on the table in the event of a British withdrawal from the consortium. 

An A300 wing set being loaded for delivery to Toulouse from Hawker's facilities.

Increasing German participation in Airbus in the event of a British pullout was part of what the coalition government from the West German 1966 elections wanted from Franz Josef Strauss and Karl Schiller- how to grow the nation's economy and despite the economic downturn of the time, the British pullout from Airbus presented an opportunity for the German economy. Once the British were out, negotiations began in earnest between West Germany and France on a new 50-50 workshare in Airbus. One of the few sticking points in the deal was that there was quite a bit of difference between the state of affairs of the West German aerospace industry and that of the French industry. Clearly the French were more built out and advanced in terms of their industrial capacity for large commercial aircraft production. This particular issue found its resolution via the solving the problem of the A300's wing which was the responsibility of Hawker Siddeley. The company was aghast with the British withdrawal from Airbus, but early on was very clear that it wanted to stay in Airbus even if the British government didn't contribute. Hawker was willing to fund 40% of the wing design and manufacture out of its own internal funds, but it needed the balance of the 60% to continue with Airbus. That majority portion of the funding for the A300's wing was to have come from the British government prior to their withdrawal. If Hawker was out, a new contractor for the wing would have to be secured and that was something the French didn't want as it was hard enough to convince the French government to continue supporting Airbus. Having to get a new wing would almost guarantee the death knell for Airbus and this was similarly the case for West Germany as well. They were on the cusp of getting a 50% stake in Airbus and there was no way for West Germany to go it alone if Hawker had to pull out and the French pulled the plug on their support. 

And that's at the moment Strauss intervened personally. He pressed the coalition government led by Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger to come up with the extra money to keep Hawker Siddeley in the consortium. Strauss sent word to Airbus that he was willing to double West Germany's financial contribution to Airbus from 500 million Deutschmarks to 1 billion Deutschmarks so Hawker's wing could be fully funded. Needless to say, Roger Béteille and his team at Airbus were quick to take up Strauss on his offer. The influx of German funds allowed Hawker to complete the work on the A300 wing with a fixed price contract for four wing sets- two for testing and two for the two prototype aircraft as well as the tooling and machinery to produce four wing sets per month for Airbus. 

Interestingly at the time of Strauss's intervention to save the Hawker wing, two of Germany's elder aircraft designers, Willy Messerschmitt and Ludwig Bölkow, insisted they had a better wing design than the Hawker wing. Both men were over 70 and claimed their wing was lighter and simpler than Hawker's design and pressed the government to abandon the British design. As one German official had put it, "We tried to prevent situations that could have been damaging for the two men, because basically one should not make famous people look ridiculous." Naturally the question became that if Messerschmitt's wing was lighter and simpler, could it still be strong and stand up to the strain of repeated takeoffs and landings in commercial service? The story goes that Messerschmitt took his design to Britain to lobby for it and was told something to the effect "Dr. Messerschmitt, I believe the fatigue life of a Bf 109 was about fifty hours provided it didn't meet a Spitfire!"

Strauss's work was crucial when Airbus was at its most vulnerable following the British withdrawal from the consortium. Strauss become the first head of Airbus's supervisory board in 1970. Increasing German participation in Airbus was also crucial to the rebuilding and expansion of the nation's aerospace industry. In honor of his contributions to supporting German aviation, the Munich Airport is named for Franz Josef Strauss. 

Source: Close to the Sun: How Airbus Challenged America's Domination of the Skies by Stephen Aris. Aurum Press, 2002, pp 35-46. Images: T-Mobile, Abendzeitung-Muenchen, Trucknetuk.com forum.

Flying High This Past Week: 23 March-29 March

Don't forget that the new URL for TAILS THROUGH TIME is now www.tailsthroughtime.com. The old blogspot URL will still work, though. Consider it a quick NOTAM! I suppose a sign you've moved up in the blogosphere is when a Wikipedia article lists one of your articles as a source! It was an Wikipedia entry on the Pratt & Whitney J58 engine that powered the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird and my blog article on the Mach 3 Phantom proposal is listed as a reference in the sources. This past week was one of the unusual weeks that two articles get posted in a week, so obviously we'll lead off with those two articles on this week's edition of Flying High This Past Week: 

• The Rise and Fall of Mohawk Airlines and Opening the Door for Frank Lorenzo: Mohawk Airlines began operations in 1944 as Robinson Air Lines, connecting Ithaca, New York, with Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. By 1952 one of the pilots at Robinson eventually took over the airline and renamed it Mohawk following an employee contest for a new name. Mohawk and its new president, Bob Peach, were legendary among local service carriers as they were the first of the second tier of airlines to operate pure jet equipment and it was Peach's determination to operate pure jets that gained him the respect of his peers in the industry. Unfortunately circumstances would doom Mohawk to the point that it had to choose between joining its long time rival, Allegheny Airlines, or a young smooth talking New York businessman whose name became infamous in the US airline industry- Frank Lorenzo. 
• Proving the Harrier Carrier: The idea of a V/STOL equipped light carrier that is sort of like the modern day equivalent of the light escort carriers of the Second World War had its genesis in the austere budgetary environment that came at the end of the Vietnam War. The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, championed a cheaper alternative to the supercarrier called the Sea Control Ship that would use the new AV-8A Harrier as the sharp point of its spear. While the Navy never went forward with the SCS concept, many of our allies paid close attention and the US Marine Corps in particular would use the experience to base the Harrier and now Harrier II aboard the big deck amphibs of the "Gator Navy".
• Two's Company and Three's A Crowd: The Boeing 737-200 Flight Crew Controversy: This article from the week before last is still getting plenty of hits. I suppose that we are all looking at the number of crew in the flight deck with a different eye these days in light of the Germanwings tragedy. 
• Operation Teaball: Network-Centric Real-Time Intelligence in Vietnam: While the tools the US military used to restore the fighting effectiveness of its combat pilots are varied, one of the more interesting tools in the renaissance of the fighter pilot in the skies over Vietnam was the use of real-time intelligence to increase the situational awareness of pilots who were operating in the skies over North Vietnam.
• The Early Days of Airbus Industrie and How the A300 Got Its Name: I don't know what interests me more- the political machinations of 1960s Europe that led to the formation of Airbus or the fact that the A300 designation sprang out of a light hearted joke. Given the juggernaut that Airbus has become in the world commercial aircraft market, it's beginnings were much less assured and much more tenuous at best. 
• How American Airlines Shaped the A300: Related to the prior linked article on the early days of Airbus Industrie, even though American Airlines didn't operate the Airbus A300 until April 1988 as the launch customer for the A300-600R variant, one of its VPs, Frank Kolk, back in the 1960s had a tremendous influence in shaping the final design of the A300. The A300 was much closer to Kolk's specification for a widebody twin that he authored in 1967 than the eventual aircraft that sprang from Kolk's requirements, the Douglas DC-10 and the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar. 
• The Ryan FR-1 Fireball and F2R Dark Shark: An Evolutionary Dead End: Probably the pinnacle of mixed-propulsion fighter aircraft, these two Ryan fighter designs of the Navy represented a rather simple but effective remedy to the shortfalls of jet engines in the immediate postwar era.

Remember that new blog articles are posted every five days. The next article will be going up on April 2nd, so stay tuned. And for those who missed it, this is last week's edition of Flying High This Past Week. 

The Early Days of Airbus Industrie and How the A300 Got Its Name

Roger Béteille, father of Airbus Industrie

The roots of the formation of Airbus Industrie are tied more to the abilities of one man more than any other individual in the early history of the Airbus consortium- Roger Béteille. A graduate of the prestigious École Polytechnique, he was the technical director of Sud-Aviation in the mid-1960s. Sud-Aviation produced the Caravelle and it was Béteille who was the director of the jet's flight test program. In postwar Europe prior to the formation of Airbus, the Caravelle was only one of two commercial aircraft programs to make money (the other being the BAC One-Eleven). He also worked closely with Hawker Siddeley on the Concorde program- this was an experience that unique among the French technocrats of the time, gave him a close working relationship and mutual respect of the British aerospace establishment. In the aerospace industry of France in those days, someone of Béteille's skills was unique given his flawless English, the respect afforded by the British engineering staff at Hawker, and his political skills in working with several European nations in the course of his career at Sud-Aviation. 

In the summer of 1966 there were three proposed commercial aviation projects that were commanding the attention of the European industry. The first one was the BAC Two-Eleven, a successor to the successful BAC One-Eleven. That summer BAC was riding high on the success of the One-Eleven which at the time was one of Britain's most successful and profitable aerospace programs. But it was already facing significant competition from the Douglas DC-9 and the Boeing 737 and BAC had been lobbying the British government for support to launch the Two-Eleven which would have been powered by a new engine Rolls-Royce was developing, the RB.211, that would also go to the Lockheed Tristar. The Two-Eleven was a larger development of the One-Eleven that for the most part, was intended to get British European Airways (BEA) to drop its interest in the Boeing 727-200. The problem with BAC was that it was heavily committed to the Concorde program and had little financial resources to devote to the further developing the Two-Eleven which is why they were keen on approximately $100 million in launch funding from the British government. 

Hawker-Breguet-Nord HBN 100

In the previous year (1965), the head of Breguet Aviation, Henri Ziegler (who later became Airbus's first president) had inked an agreement with fellow French firm Nord Aviation and Hawker Siddeley in the UK to jointly work on a widebody twin called the HBN 100 that was largely the product of Hawker's engineers at their Hatfield facility. The HBN 100 was to have two variants, one with a passenger capacity for 225 and a stretched one with a capacity for 260. The planned engines were to be either the Pratt & Whitney JT9D that was under development at the time for the Boeing 747 or the Rolls Royce RB.178 which was a three-shaft demonstrator engine called the "Super Conway" that eventually led to the RB.211. At the same time as the HBN 100, Sud-Aviation (Roger Béteille's firm) was working the Galion which was very similar in layout, appearance and size to the HBN 100. The Sud-Aviation Galion evolved from what had started out as an enlarged Caravelle. 

Sud Aviation Galion

In 1966 Béteille invited his friends from Hawker Siddeley to Sud Aviation's facility in Toulouse to see if the design work on the HBN 100 and the Galion might be aligned towards a common joint project. That invitation for Arthur Howes, who headed the Hawker team, to come to Toulouse is what gave birth to the Airbus. It soon become a joint program with engineers from all the involved companies shuttling down to Toulouse as needed as the designs of the Galion and the HBN 100 were more closely aligned. That December at a meeting in London, France, Great Britain, and West Germany- I'll soon get to how the Germans entered the picture- decided that a single consortium would build a widebody twin. At time time, Concorde had two production lines- one in France and one in the UK, and on top of the financial costs of the program, the duplication of effort was something Roger Béteille wished to avoid so that an attractively priced aircraft could be offered to the world's airlines. It was agreed that in exchange for Rolls Royce developing a new engine for their design, the Sud Aviation Galion would form the baseline design to work from with the HBN 100 being sidelined. 

It was obvious at the time that any joint effort would be spearheaded by Britain and France, the only Western European nations at the time that had the industrial capacity for large commercial aircraft design and production. But the West Germans were keeping an eye on the developments and the use of the name "Airbus" in reference to the nascent project actually came from them. Even though it was twenty years after the end of World War II, the German aircraft industry was still in shambles. Many legendary names like Messerschmitt and Dornier were still around, but even those entities were hollow shells of their former selves. What engineering staff hadn't left Germany after the war debated the future of their industry and decided the future lay in collaboration on a civil aircraft project. The year before Roger Béteille invited the British to meet in Toulouse, seven German aircraft companies (ATG Siebelwerke, Bolkow, Dornier, Flugzeug-union Sud, Hamburger Flugzeugbau, Messerschimitt and VFW) formed Studiengruppe Airbus (the Airbus Study Group) to determine what sort of aircraft the future airline market would need. It was this grouping of German companies that contributed the Airbus name to the young enterprise. It was at the following year's Farnborough Air Show that German participation was formalized. Up to that point, the Germans had been working on their own but it was decided that what the French and British had come up with baselined off the Sud Aviation Galion was a suitable candidate for their contribution to the effort. Officially becoming Airbus, each nation decided that one company from each nation would take the lead for that nation's contribution. Hawker Siddeley would lead the British contribution, Sud Aviation would lead the French contribution and the German Airbus Study Group was reorganized into a formal consortium of their own, Airbus AG, to lead the German contribution. 

But what to name this aircraft? Arthur Howes of Hawker Siddeley was partial to the name "Obelix" which was the giant in the Asterix series of comic books popular in those days. It was apparent, though, that the name had to be something that was essentially neutral to British, French and German interests. One evening at a dinner in Sud Aviation's Paris headquarters the upper level of management at Sud Aviation asked why a name for the aircraft hadn't been found yet. Different ideas were punted about before Howes himself spoke up as a joke and said "I propose we call it the HSA 300" and the room laughed as "HSA" was the initials of Hawker Siddeley Aviation. But Howes continued "H- Hawker Siddeley, S- Sud Aviation, A- Airbus, and 300 because it's a nice round number." As everyone enjoyed Howes' joke, it suddenly donned on him- why don't we call it the A300? 300 is still a nice round number closest to the proposed design's seating capacity and if "A" was used, the aircraft would always appear before Boeing in any alphabetical listing. Howes idea proved popular and the nascent enterprise's new design would be marketed as the Airbus A300.

Further reading on this blog on the early history of Airbus:

How American Airlines Shaped the A300
How Rolls Royce Scuttled British Participation in Airbus

Related reading:
American Airlines Picks the DC-10 (American's pick of the DC-10 is intertwined with the early history of Airbus)

Source: Close to the Sun: How Airbus Challenged America's Domination of the Skies by Stephen Aris. Aurum Press, 2002, pp 6-11. Images: Wikipedia, Air International

How Rolls-Royce Scuttled British Participation in Airbus

In the late 1960s as the nascent Airbus Industrie was formalizing the design of the A300, the original intent of the consortium was to use a new 47,500 lb-thrust turbofan in development by Rolls-Royce, the RB.207. Great Britain at the time was actively involved in the early days of Airbus as a full partner, riding on the heels of the Anglo-French Concorde program. The two main British companies involved with Airbus at the time were Rolls-Royce to provide the engines for the A300 and Hawker Siddeley to provide the wing design for the airliner. However, all was not well for the commercial airframe start up as development costs in Toulouse were rising and worse yet, RB.207 development was falling behind at Rolls-Royce. I had posted earlier on the A300 that the original design for the aircraft, the HBN100, was a much larger aircraft than what resulted, seating over 300 passengers compared to the 250 of A300 as built. As result of the HBN100 being a twin jet the size of the rival Lockheed L-1011 and McDonnell Douglas DC-10, it would need more powerful engines than the Rolls-Royce RB.211 used on the Tristar and the General Electric CF6 used on the DC-10 and this responsibility was assigned to Rolls-Royce to develop the RB.207. 

With the development of the RB.207 behind schedule, timing could not have been worse in 1968 when European financial houses made a run on the French gold reserves that depleted the reserves by 30% in a short period of time and caused not just the collapse of the French franc, but the collapse of President Charles De Gaulle's government amidst political unrest in the country. As economic malaise spread through Europe, airlines began to have doubts about the viability of the A300 and its original 300+ seating capacity. Airbus partners Sud-Aviation and Hawker Siddeley even began to prepare fall back designs based around a smaller aircraft. 

Matters worsened through the year for Airbus as the Rolls-Royce was also developing the RB.211 engine for the Tristar as well as the RB.207. Given that three engines were going into the Tristar versus only two engines for the original A300 design, Rolls-Royce began to divert engineering resources from the RB.207 program to the RB.211 program which was facing technical issues of its own as the world's first three-spool engine design. The RB.207 wasn't even Airbus' first choice for the A300. French engine manufacturer SNECMA had partnered with Pratt & Whitney to offer the JT9D engine which was initially favored by Airbus, but Rolls-Royce exercised its considerable political clout and had the UK government push for a "European" engine in the form of the proposed RB.207. Rolls-Royce even went as far as to suggest that it was wrong for an American engine be part of a European aircraft. Due to pressure from Rolls-Royce and the UK government, the RB.207 engine was selected for the original A300 design but in just a few years it was Rolls-Royce itself that was putting more emphasis on the RB.211 for the Tristar than the RB.207 it had pushed for just a few years earlier!

The writing on the wall came when Roger Beteille, the head of Airbus, found out the selling price of the RB.211 engine. He had found out that two RB.207 engines would cost more than three RB.211 engines which put the A300 at a considerable price disadvantage to the Tristar. There was no way the A300 would succeed if Airbus stuck it out with Rolls-Royce and the RB.207 engine. The only way Airbus could find a way out was to change the size of the A300 from a 300+ seat aircraft to a 250 seat maximum aircraft. It was a master stroke that saved the program as it now made existing engines in the form of the RB.211 and the CF6 now appropriate for the A300 and Pratt & Whitney/SNECMA could now offer the JT9D as well. 

In December 1968, the A300 was formally launched as a 250 seater with a wider range of engine options that left out the RB.207 engine. As a smaller aircraft, the airlines of Europe were more interested in the design and ironically, it was the head of Hawker Siddeley, Sir Harry Broadhurst, who announced that the RB.207 engine wasn't needed and that the JT9D was on the table as an option for the new A300 design. At this point things got very complicated for the UK government. Money had been provided for the development of the RB.207 engine for the original A300 design. Money had also been invested in the BAC Three-Eleven, which was now square in competition with new, smaller A300 design. The Three-Eleven would have been powered by two RB.211 engines, the engines that Rolls-Royce had given development priority over the RB.207. In the end, a need for address Great Britain's trade deficit meant that official support was given to the Three-Eleven program. This also increased the market for the RB.211 engine as continual problems at Rolls-Royce eventually resulted in the company going into receivership with the British government to keep it afloat. By the summer of 1970 Great Britain withdrew from the Airbus consortium as continued support for Rolls-Royce put it in conflict with the A300, but Sir Harry Broadhurst felt Hawker's investment was worth keeping and Hawker Siddeley remained with the Airbus consortium as a major subcontractor building the wings for the A300. 

Source: Flight of the Titans: Boeing, Airbus, and the Battle for the Future of Air Travel by Kenny Kemp. Virgin Books, 2006, p71-84.

An American Astronaut Saves the A300 and Airbus

The first several years of Airbus' existence after the first flight of the A300 were miserable ones as orders slowly trickled in while the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar were racking up order after order from the world's airlines. Between the end of 1975 and May of 1977, Airbus failed to get even a single order for the A300. The joke at the factory at Toulouse was "Don't miss the last train out of town to Germany" in reference to the large number of German workers present. Part of the problem was the recession in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil embargo on the West. But a big part of the problem was the Airbus was an upstart facing the powerful sales machines of Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Lockheed. For a lot of the world's airlines, buying the A300 simply wasn't on their radar screen. The program was in jeopardy and the member nations of the Airbus consortium were getting restless as debates continued on whether they'd misread the market or not. 

But all of that was to change with the passage of airline deregulation in the United States. The world's largest airline market in terms of passengers moved, breaking into the US market was a key goal for Airbus and one of the main reasons that they had sought the advice of Frank Kolk at American Airlines back in the late 1960s when the design was still being formalized. With deregulation, free market forces now determined routes, fares and frequencies on the US East Coast, one of the dominant legacy carriers was taking a severe beating on its prized routes between the US Northeast and Florida. Eastern found itself embroiled in a bruising market fight with National and Delta. Eastern was already operating the Lockheed Tristar on the routes and word got to Airbus that they were interested in a 200-seat aircraft with better operating economics than the Tristar. With only two engines, the fuel burn on the A300 was already lower than that of the Tristar and with 2/3 the seating capacity, Airbus felt they had an ideal product to meet Eastern's needs. 

Eastern had been in discussions with Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas already but Eastern's financial position in the wake its battle with National and Delta meant it needed an aircraft with better economics than the Tristar and it needed them at a sweet deal. On the day of the final sales presentations by the all the manufacturers, Airbus was slotted in to present to Eastern's management and its president, former Apollo 8 mission commander and astronaut Frank Borman. Airbus' team gave its presentation and then offered a sweetener- they had four "white tail" aircraft (completed A300s that had no buyers) that Eastern could immediately lease for a four month trial. If they were happy with the aircraft, they could order more. Borman sent word to Toulouse after deliberations "Congratulations, you've got a blue-eyed baby." It was the breakthrough that saved the A300 program- after a very successful trial, on 6 April 1978, Eastern ordered 23 A300s with options on more. But the bold move by Borman upset many. 

The Department of Commerce and some in the US government demanded an explanation from Borman. After all, political influence several years earlier was successful in steering Western Airlines away from the A300. Borman was accused of being anti-patriotic depsite his military and space records. Charles Forsyth, the VP for McDonnell Douglas, even angrily called Borman directly and accused him of being unpatriotic. Borman reportedly asked Forsyth what brand of luxury car he drove, knowing the answer wasn't American. Borman explained that the most valuable part of the Airbus A300 were its engines and those engines were GE engines along with a large amount of American content from thousands of subcontractors. Congressional hearings were even held at Boeing's urging with accusations of predatory pricing by Airbus to make the sales- many of the same arguments being made these days in Airbus versus Boeing sales fights. Regardless, it was a major achievement for the young Airbus Industrie and would become legend throughout Europe how an American astronaut saved the A300 program. 

Source: Flight of the Titans: Boeing, Airbus, and the Battle for the Future of Air Travel by Kenny Kemp. Virgin Books, 2006, p96-99.

How American Airlines Shaped the A300

In 1966, Sud Aviation and Breguet of France signed an agreement to cooperate with fellow French aircraft company Nord Aviation and British manufacturer Hawker Siddeley on a medium-range twin-aisle widebody aircraft with two engines tentatively designated HBN100. French President Charles De Gaulle asked Roger Beteille, an experienced technical manager who was the head of Alcatel Space, a French space systems company, to head the new joint venture. Beteille was one of the few French aeronautical managers who was fluent in English as well and highly regarded by the Hawker Siddeley team. For the next year, Beteille honed the HBN100 design to reflect the European marketplace as well as to accommodate the delicate political aspirations of each of the partners in the program. Size, capacity, range and even engine options were hammered out.

By 1967 Beteille was aware of the coming widebody competition in the United States with the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar. Both aircraft were trijets whereas the HBN100 design would be a twin jet of slightly smaller size. Rolls-Royce was already working with Lockheed to launch the RB.211 engine for the Tristar whilst working on the proposed RB.207 engine for the HBN100. At the time, the HBN100 design was larger than what it would be come as the A300 and Rolls-Royce was investing more time and energy in getting the RB.211 to market than the RB.207, something that troubled Beteille (it would also ultimately lead to Great Britain pulling out of the Airbus consortium). In a master stroke, Beteille convinced the partner nations to accept a smaller design that could use the same engines as were being developed for the Lockheed Tristar (the Rolls-Royce RB.211) and McDonnell Douglas DC-10 (the General Electric CF6). By getting the partners to agree to a smaller design, Beteille insured that Rolls-Royce wouldn't delay the program by dragging its feet on the more powerful RB.207 engine. Ultimately in 1969 Rolls-Royce abandoned development of the RB.207, so Beteille's decision was a prescient one. 

With the Tristar and the DC-10 flying first, the engines could be debugged and by the time what would become the A300 first flew, the engine choices would be operationally mature. It was a master stroke that saved the A300 at its most nascent stage. But Beteille was no gambler and deliberate in his calculations to keep the program moving. He often told his associates that it would be necessary to understand the American market as it was the biggest passenger market in the world. If Beteille's aircraft was going to be a success, they needed to make it in the United States as well. The airlines of the United States at the time were the operational envy of the world and Beteille decided he needed to meet with both United and American, as both airlines were known for the technical expertise and operational efficiency. And it didn't hurt that both airlines were launching the DC-10 which was powered by the same GE CF6 engine that Beteille wanted as an option on the A300. 

I had posted earlier about American Airlines' selection of the DC-10 and how American had laid out the original specifications for a widebody twin. The other airlines briefed wanted either three engines or four engines and American was the only airline who wanted only two engines. After meeting with United Airlines in San Francisco, Beteille met with Frank Kolk, American Airlines' VP for Development Engineering who originally authored the specifications that led to the DC-10. When Beteille met with Kolk, the tough-talking Texan admitted that he was disappointed that the DC-10 would have three engines as he would have much preferred a widebody twinjet. Neither McDonnell Douglas or Lockheed was interested in a twinjet and Kolk was very enthusiastic to meet with a team that shared his vision for widebody twin despite American's launch of the DC-10. In their discussions, Kolk discussed in detail what American wanted and its reasons for wanting a twinjet (fuel economy, operating economics, lower price per aircraft given that engines can amount to 35-40% of the cost of a new jet). Knowing what Beteille had planned, Kolk shared the original specifications with him and Beteille quickly returned to Europe and used American's specification and results of his discussion with Frank Kolk to nail down the final configuration and operating parameters of the A300. 

On 11 December 1968, the newly-formed Airbus Industrie revealed its Airbus A300B design to the aviation world. To this day Roger Beteille believes that it was the advice and discussions with Frank Kolk that made the A300 so successful that it formed the basis of the later A310, A330 and A340 jetliners. Ironically, it wasn't until April 1988 that American Airlines took delivery as the launch customer of the extended range A300-600R that was recently retired after over 20 years of service with American. Despite already having the Boeing 767-200/300 in the fleet, the A300 in its penultimate incarnation did eventually serve with Frank Kolk's airline!

Source: Flight of the Titans: Boeing, Airbus, and the Battle for the Future of Air Travel by Kenny Kemp. Virgin Books, 2006, p71-77.

In the 1970s the US commercial airframe manufacturers were following closely the progress of the Airbus A300's development. In the spring of 1976, Boeing proposed a joint airliner based on a Boeing wing and an A300 fuselage designated the BB10. Talks continued for sometime despite mutual suspicions in Seattle and Toulouse with Airbus eventually deciding to abandon the BB10 project. Boeing then approached British Aerospace about a risk-sharing partnership in the 757 program, but to no avail.

Source: Airbus A300 (Airliner Color History) by GUnther Endres. MBI Publishing, 1999, p56.