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Aviation History
1984
1984 - 0473.PDF
AIRBUS UPDATE FLIGHT . mrwMNAnoHAL NEXT WEEK We record the histories, key personnel, and equip ment ot the mi' ~ t , • ' x our comprt I - sive World Airline Direc tory, compiled by John I i David Velupillai looks at two ma oi • isions facing Europe for • its space programme in the Nineties —how to build on Space- lab's achievements, and what type of rocket should succeed Ariane 4. A3 20 revealed Cyprus Airways is Airbus Industrie's latest A320 customer Airbus Industrie's new "baby", the 150-seater A320 short/medium range airliner, will fly in February or March 1987 and will go into commercial service "early in 1988". The road to its launch has been a hard one, says execu tive vice-president and general manager Roger Beteille, but now, he adds, "we just have to do it". The hard road still lies ahead. The A3 20 will be the most extensive single package of new technology and new ideas to get airborne since the jet age came to the airlines, and Airbus has to see it through the certificators on time. The European manufacturing consortium is not hamstrung by having any of its own narrowbodies on which to base the design of a new machine, so it starts with a clean sheet of paper in designing the A320. DAVID LEARMOUNT and DAVID VELUPILLAI report from Toulouse. The airliner market Airbus estimates that orders for 7,574 new airliners will be placed between now and the year 2002, in addition to those 700-odd aircraft on order but not yet delivered. The com pany divides this market into three broad sectors: short/ medium range single-aisle 3,356; short/medium range twin-aisle 3,079; long range (more than 5,000km) 1,139. Airbus expects to sell 1,000 A320s into the 3,300-plus market, but claims that it will break even on sales of 600. If an A320 had been avail able for delivery in 1982-83, it would have cost $25 million, says Airbus, compared with the 737-300's $20 million. Airbus plans to expand its family of aircraft as rapidly as possible to take advantage of as much of this market as it can. Hence, having launched the A320, the company has stated its impatience to go ahead with the TA-11 or TA-9 as soon as it can obtain the finance. Executive v-p Roger Beteille says that technically there would be no problem in getting the TA-9 and TA-11 airborne by 1990, but "financially it would be a problem unless there was a particularly strong recovery" in the near future. "That is why we talk of 1992", Beteille says. This particularly strong recovery would mean a world real GNP annual increase of more than 3 per cent, which is the figure on which the Airbus forecasts are based. Airbus also believes that "no new technological development will have a fundamental impact on air traffic". What it means by this is that people will continue to travel despite' the eventual widespread use of electronic data transfer and communications. Another belief is that fuel will remain available, its price growing at the average GNP rate plus about 1-5 per cent. Airbus forecasts that airlines will remain able to finance new aircraft acquisition, and will have to do so with passenger traffic growth averaging 5-6 per cent over the next 20 years—therefore tripling by the year 2002. But flight frequencies will be constrained by airport and airway limitations, says Airbus, and will be able to grow only 2-4 per cent per year. The latter is the company's reason for its strong faith in the need for the TA-9, which is a stretched, rewinged, new-technology A300. By the end of this century, Airbus believes, North America's share of the "Western" world's airline traffic will have declined from the 48 per cent of 1980 to 38 per cent. FLIGHT International, 24 March 1984 735
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