Close to the Sun How Airbus Challenged America's Domination of the Skies

How Europe Won Back Its Place In The Skies; The history of Airbus Industrie, the builders of the Airbus family of airliners, is an extraordinary saga involving diplomatic dramas, billion-dollar gambles in high technology and a life-and-death struggle between the European planemakers and the giants of the American aerospace industry. Airbus began in 1967 with a Franco-German-British agreement to build a twin-engined, wide-bodied airliner, the plane that eventually became the Airbus A300. For the Germans, and especially for the French, the venture was a calculated response to Le Defi Americain, the threat of American economic domination, and it was largely their faith and determination which kept the venture going through its first eight years, when just 38 planes were sold, mainly to Air France. The British attitude, on the other hand, was distinctly equivocal, and the ink was barely dry on the agreement before Harold Wilson's government decided to back out and Rolls Royce took the fatal decision to back Lockheed's Tristar in preference to the Airbus. Happily for the British industry, however, Hawker Siddeley, with financial support from the Germans, kept a foot in the door and Brit