Word: airbuses
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Despite these setbacks, however, Europe's planemakers are at last seeing a patch or two of blue sky. Last week the wide-bodied A300B airbus, made by a Paris-based multinational consortium called Airbus Industrie, went into commercial service on Air France between Paris and London. This week the ambitious MRCA (multirole combat aircraft), a joint project of Britain, West Germany and Italy, is scheduled to make its maiden flight in the skies above Munich. Both promise to offer stiff competition for American planemakers...
...A300B, Europe's aircraft builders are offering greater passenger capacity in the high-density, short-to medium-range travel market now dominated by Boeing's 727 and McDonnell Douglas' DC-9-both smaller aircraft. If last week's flight was any harbinger, the European airbus will do well. All 251 seats (compared with a maximum of 163 on a U.S. 727) on the twin-engine plane were filled, and Air France reported that its first 30 flights to London were sold out. The line has also announced that it plans additional round-trip runs to Nice...
...aviation showcase of the world. (Instead, U.S. aircraft companies simply revised existing designs.) Yet even with the A300B, the MRCA and many other entries by the British, the West Germans and even the Soviets, there is a feeling that the European industry is in need of organizational streamlining. Airbus Industrie, for example, is a consortium of companies in Britain, West Germany, The Netherlands, Spain and France. Each company builds components that are shipped to the Aérospatiale center in Toulouse, where they are finally assembled. The MRCA is built by Panavia of Munich, jointly owned by the British, West...
...lags behind European consortiums in building two other types of aircraft that could well become workhorse transports by the latter half of the decade. One is a twin-engine wide-body jet for short-to medium-range hauls. The 300-passenger A-300B airbus, which is being built by a five-nation European consortium, will be the first such plane on the market; it is scheduled for commercial service next March. The other type is a STOL (for short takeoff and landing) plane for brief hops between urban airports. France's Dassault-Brequet Mercure craft should be providing STOL...
...filled. Thus the U.S. companies see no market for new planes any time soon, and they have not pushed development of the advanced designs that they do have. Boeing and McDonnell Douglas are participating in STOL development with foreign partners, and McDonnell Douglas has undertaken advance planning on an airbus that could be built from its DC-10 design, but it has held up on production. Says Vice President Jackson McGowen: "No American company has committed itself to the A-300B airbus [with which the McDonnell plane would compete] and even in Europe sales are going slowly. The airlines...