A word anyone could say

At the 1965 Paris Air Show, European airlines sketched a wish for a short-haul jet carrying more than 100 passengers, and the word they used for it was airbus — a generic term that happened to work in French, German and English alike. It took five years of politics to turn the idea into a company. Britain’s government pulled out in April 1969, but Hawker Siddeley stayed in privately to design the wings. On 18 December 1970 Airbus Industrie was formed in France as a groupement d’intérêt économique, a loose partnership between Aérospatiale and Deutsche Airbus. Spain’s CASA joined in October 1971 with 4.2 per cent.

Whitetails in Toulouse

The first product was bold. The A300, which flew from Toulouse on 28 October 1972 a month ahead of schedule, was the world’s first twin-engine widebody airliner. Its co-pilot that day was Bernard Ziegler, son of Henri Ziegler, the man who had kept France committed when Britain walked away. Air France put it into service between Paris and London on 23 May 1974. Then the orders stopped. From December 1975 to May 1977 Airbus did not sell a single new aircraft. Finished jets with no customer, whitetails, piled up at Toulouse, and production was throttled back to half an aircraft a month.

The free trial that cracked America

The breakthrough came from an astronaut. Frank Borman, the Apollo 8 commander who had become chief executive of Eastern Air Lines, was offered four A300B4s on a six-month lease for almost nothing; Eastern paid only for crew training and running costs. Borman reported the jets burned 30 per cent less fuel than his Lockheed TriStars, and in 1977 Eastern ordered 23. Airbus had its first major American customer, and its sales chief Bernard Lathière pressed home an aggressive strategy. In January 1979 British Aerospace returned as a full partner with 20 per cent, and the A310 followed in 1982.

Flying by wire

The aircraft that made Airbus first flew on 22 February 1987. The A320 was the world’s first airliner with digital fly-by-wire controls, flown by sidestick rather than control column, with computers guarding against stalls and overstress. It had more than 400 orders before it flew and entered service with Air France on 18 April 1988. The technology was controversial at first, and accidents tested it: an A320 crashed into trees during a low pass at the Habsheim air show in June 1988. Yet the cockpit commonality it introduced, carried into the A330 and A340 of the early 1990s, became one of the company’s strongest selling points.

From club to company

For thirty years Airbus was a club of national champions. That changed in 2000, when Aérospatiale-Matra, Germany’s DASA and CASA merged into EADS, and in 2001 Airbus became a proper company, Airbus SAS. BAE Systems sold its 20 per cent to EADS in 2006. The group renamed itself Airbus in 2014 and in 2017 merged its holding and aircraft companies into a single Airbus SE. A darker chapter closed in January 2020, when Airbus agreed to pay a record 3.6 billion euros to French, British and American authorities to settle bribery and corruption investigations.

The superjumbo nobody bought enough of

The A380 was Airbus at its most ambitious. Rolled out in Toulouse in January 2005 and first flown on 27 April that year, it was certified for up to 853 passengers. Then came delays: Toulouse and Hamburg had used incompatible versions of the CATIA design software, and some 530 km of cabin wiring had to be redesigned. Singapore Airlines flew the first service on 25 October 2007. Emirates became the great champion of the type with 123 aircraft, but the market had turned to big twins. Production end was announced in February 2019, and the 251st and last delivery went to Emirates on 16 December 2021.

Overtaking the 737

The quieter bets paid off. The A350 first flew in 2013; Bombardier’s CSeries, which Airbus took over in 2018 and renamed the A220, gave it a small jet that Boeing had tried to tariff out of America. And the A320 kept selling. Just after midnight on 7 October 2025 an A320neo for Saudi carrier flynas became the family’s 12,260th delivery, overtaking the Boeing 737 as the most delivered jetliner ever. Airbus delivered 793 aircraft in 2025, ended the year with a backlog of 8,754, and reported revenue of 73.4 billion euros. The whitetails of 1976 are long forgotten.

Fábricas

• Toulouse-Blagnac · Toulouse, France — Operational headquarters; final assembly of A320 family, A330 and A350
• Hamburg-Finkenwerder · Hamburg, Germany — A320 family final assembly
• Tianjin · Tianjin, China — A320 family final assembly since 2009
• Airbus Mobile · Mobile, Alabama, USA — A320 family since 2016 and A220
• Mirabel · Mirabel, Quebec, Canada — Main A220 final assembly line, inherited from Bombardier
• San Pablo, Seville · Seville, Spain — A400M and C295 final assembly

Pessoas

• Henri Ziegler · co-founder and early administrator — Persuaded France to stay in the programme after Britain withdrew in 1969
• Roger Béteille · technical director from 1967 — Shaped the A300 and Airbus’s cross-border work-sharing
• Bernard Lathière · chief executive — Pushed the aggressive sales drive that followed the Eastern deal
• Frank Borman · Eastern Air Lines chief executive, former astronaut — Took four A300s on trial and ordered 23 in 1977, Airbus’s first big US sale
• Guillaume Faury · chief executive since April 2019

Recordes e pioneirismos

• A300: world’s first twin-engine widebody airliner, 1972
• A320: world’s first airliner with digital fly-by-wire controls, 1987
• A320 family: most delivered jetliner in history, passing the Boeing 737 at 12,260 deliveries on 7 October 2025
• A380: world’s largest passenger airliner, certified for 853 passengers
• Record 3.6 billion euro corruption settlement with France, the UK and the US, January 2020