The Airbus A300 was to be the first aircraft which was designed, made and sold by Airbus Industrie. By 1967, the "A300" label was given an airliner which Airbus Industrie was thinking about making, with 320 seats and two engines. Roger Béteille was made the technical director of the A300 design. Béteille decided which companies would make which parts of the plane: France would make the cockpit, flight controls and part of the fuselage; Hawker Siddeley made the wings; Germany made part of the fuselage; the Dutch made the flaps and spoilers; and Spain made the horizontal tailplane. On 26 September 1967 the German, French and British governments signed an agreement in London, which allowed Airbus Industrie to continue designing the plane. Rolls-Royce made the engines.
Airlines did not really want a 300+ seat Airbus A300, so Airbus Industrie made the A250 proposal. This later became the A300B, which had 250 seats and did not need a new engine design. This made the plane much cheaper to design, as the Rolls-Royce RB207 which would have been used in the A300 made up a lot of the costs. The RB207 had also had design problems and delays, since Rolls-Royce was concentrating on designing a different jet engine, the RB211, for the Lockheed L-1011 The A300B was smaller but lighter than its American rivals.
In 1972, the A300 made its first flight. The first type of A300, the A300B2, began being used by airlines in 1974. However, not much attention was paid to the A300 because of the launch of Concorde. At first, the A300 was not very successful. However, airlines began to order more and more. Part of this was because of the Airbus Industrie CEO Bernard Lathière, who tried to sell the plane to airlines in America and Asia. By 1979, Airbus Industrie had 256 orders for the A300. Airbus Industrie had also designed a more advanced aircraft, the Airbus A310, the year before. It was the A320 in 1981 which made Airbus Industrie a very big aircraft maker. More than 400 orders were made for the A320 before it even flew. Only 15 were made for the A300 before it first flew.
Since Airbus Industrie's planes were made by different companies, Airbus Industrie really only sold and advertised the planes. It became obvious that Airbus was no longer a temporary group made just to make one plane. It had become a big company which could make more planes. By the late 1980s, Airbus Industrie was working on two medium-sized planes: the Airbus A330 and the Airbus A340.
In the early 1990s, the Airbus CEO Jean Pierson said that the partnership should be closed, and Airbus Industrie should become its own company. However, the difficulties of integrating and valuing the assets of four companies, as well as legal issues, delayed the initiative. In December 1998, when British Aerospace and DASA were close to merging with each other, Aérospatiale stopped the negotiations. The French company thought that if BAe and DASA merged, that company would own 57.9% of Airbus. Aérospatiale insisted that each company own half of Airbus each. However, the problem was fixed in January 1999, when BAe merged with Marconi Electronic Systems instead. This company became BAE Systems. Then in 2000, three of the companies which made Airbus Industrie (DaimlerChrysler Aerospace, the new Deutsche Airbus; Aérospatiale-Matra, the new Sud-Aviation; and CASA) merged. This merger made EADS. EADS now owned Airbus France, Airbus Deutschland and Airbus España, which was 80% of Airbus Industrie. BAE Systems and EADS created the new company, Airbus . Both companies owned part of Airbus.
Throughout 1988, some Airbus engineers, led by Jean Roeder, began secretly designing a very big plane. It was made to allow Airbus to rival Boeing, whose 747 had been the only very big plane since the 1970s. Airbus made the project public at the 1990 Farnborough Air Show. Airbus wanted to make this plane 15% cheaper to use than the Boeing 747-400. In June 1994, Airbus named the plane the A3XX.
Five A380s were made for testing, and also to demonstrate the plane to airlines and the public. The first A380 was shown to the public on 18 January 2005, and it first flew on 27 April 2005. The head test pilot said that flying the A380 was like "like handling a bicycle". On 1 December 2005, the A380 reached its maximum speed, Mach 0.96. On 10 January 2006, the A380 made its first flight across the Atlantic, to Medellín, in Colombia.
On 3 October 2006, Airbus' CEO Christian Streiff said that the Airbus A380 was delayed because of problems with the software used to design the aircraft. The Toulouse factory used the latest version of CATIA (made by Dassault), but the people who were designing the plane in the Hamburg factory were using an older version. The 530 km of cables which go through the aircraft had to have their design completely changed. No airlines cancelled their orders, but Airbus still had to pay a lot of money because of the delay.
The first A380 was delivered to Singapore Airlines on 15 October 2007. It began to be used on 25 October 2007, when it flew between Singapore and Sydney. Two months later, Singapore Airlines' CEO Chew Choong Seng said that the A380 was better than both the airline and Airbus thought. It used 20% less fuel per passenger than the Boeing 747-400. Emirates was the second airline to get an A380 on 28 July 2008, and it used the A380 to fly between Dubai and New York on 1 August 2008. Qantas got the A380 on 19 September 2008, and its A380s flew between Melbourne and Los Angeles on 20 October 2008.
On 6 April 2006, it was announced that BAE Systems would sell its 20% of Airbus. Its share was worth about €3.5 billion (US$4.17 billion). At first, BAE wanted to agree a price with EADS informally.
On 2 July 2006, BAE's part of the company was thought to be worth about £1.9 billion (€2.75 billion), which was much less than what BAE, analysts, and even EADS thought. In September 2006, BAE sold its part of Airbus for £1.87 billion (€2.75 billion, $3.53 billion). On 4 October, BAE's shareholders decided that the sale should go ahead, meaning that Airbus is now completely owned by EADS.
On 28 February 2007, CEO Louis Gallois said that Airbus was planning to make some changes. The programme was called Power, and it got rid of 10,000 jobs over four years: 4,300 in France, 3,700 in Germany, 1,600 in the UK and 400 in Spain. Airbus factories in Saint Nazaire, Varel and Laupheim could be sold or closed, while Meaulte, Nordenham and Filton are "open to investors". Unions in France and Germany threatened to go on strike because of the job cuts.
At the 2011 Paris Air Show, Airbus got 730 orders for Airbus A320neo family planes. These orders were worth $72.2 billion, and the number of orders is a new record in aviation. The A320neo was announced in December 2010, and it got 667 orders. Together with the orders before that time, there were 1029 orders made within six months after the plane was launched, which is also a new record.
The first Airbus plane was the A300, the world's first twin-engined aircraft to have two aisles. A shorter version of the A300 is called the Airbus A310. Airbus launched the A320, which is special as it is the first commercial plane to use a digital fly-by-wire control system. The A320 has been, and still is, a very big success. The A318 and A319 are shorter versions, and the A321 is a longer version, of the A320. The A320's main rival is the Boeing 737 family.
The long-range wide-body planes, the Airbus A330 and the Airbus A340, have efficient wings, which also have winglets. The Airbus A340-500 can fly for , which is the second-longest range for any commercial plane, after the Boeing 777-200LR. All Airbus aircraft after the A320 have similar cockpits, which makes it easier to train pilots. Airbus stopped making A340s in 2011 because not enough planes were being sold compared to other planes like the Boeing 777.