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by eastbound 2 hours ago
It’s beautiful because Boeing started, not with the smallest, but with the largest plane possible. Meanwhile Airbus started with Concorde, a completely orthogonal project to round up everyone’s identical patriotism, and both projects were absolutely beautiful in their own way!
1 comments
dingaling 1 hour ago
> Meanwhile Airbus started with Concorde

Oh gracious no, Airbus started with the utilitarian A300 widebody twin[1].

Concorde was Sud Aviation and BAC joint venture, nothing to do with Airbus which didn't even exist at that time.

[1]The original A300A might have been interesting, having a fuselage as wide as the much later 777, but Airbus got cold feet and scaled it down to the dull and worthy A300B. Every Airbus widebody until the A380 was constrained by that decision.

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ahartmetz 5 minutes ago
Well. If you squint a little, Sud Aviation and BAC + others became Airbus. Airbus was first a consortium and then a proper successor (through a merger) to several European aircraft manufacturers. Sud Aviation's acquirer Aérospatiale was an initial member of the Airbus consortium and BAC's acquirer British Aerospace joined slightly later in 1979.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#History has a diagram of all the predecessor companies.

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