Airbus Updates No.3843

50 years ago the first Airbus took to the skies

Yesterday, 28 October 2022, it was fifty years ago that the first Airbus took to the skies. On 28 October 1972, Airbus A300B1 (001) with test registration F-WUAB, took off for the first flight ever of an Airbus product.

The flight lasted 1 hour and 25 minutes, during which a maximum speed of 185 knots was reached at an altitude of 14,000 feet.

It was not the only scoop that day, because it was also the first flight of a two-engined wide-body aircraft.

The first flight was the start of a very successful journey, as in the last fifty years Airbus has grown to become one of the major aircraft manufacturers of civil aircraft. Early in the seventies, European airframers only had around 10% of the global market share, with the remaining 90% going to the three main American manufacturers (Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed).

In July 1967, a framework agreement for "strengthening European cooperation in the field of aviation for the joint development and production of an air bus” (a non-proprietary term used by the airline industry in the 1960s to refer to a commercial aircraft of a certain size and range) was reached by the French, German and UK governments, allowing detailed design work and planning to start in earnest. By this time the project had evolved towards a 270 to 300 seat aircraft (hence the A300 name).

  

Fifty years after the first flight of an Airbus aircraft, they have built 14,330 more:

• 822 A300/A310s (various variants)
• 10,559 A320s (various variants)
• 1,941 A330/A340s (various variants)
• 254 A380s
• 243 A220s (various variants, also part built as Bombardier CS)

With a backlog of more than 7,300 orders, it is a question of time when the 20,000 mark will be passed.