Airbus Essay

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Airbus is the aircraft manufacturing division of the Airbus Group. Headquartered in Blagnac, France, it has manufacturing and production facilities predominantly in France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. In these 4 locations alone Airbus employs about 63,000 people, and in 2009 it also started a final assembly plant in Tianjin, China. Airbus also has subsidiaries in Unites States, Japan and India. (Airbus.com)
Airbus Industrie began as a consortium of European aviation firms in order to provide competition to American companies such as Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Lockheed. Despite multiple small European aircraft companies, none could manage more than a relatively short production run (Nicholls, 2001). In 1991, Jean Pierson, then CEO and Managing Director of Airbus Industrie, described a number of factors which explained the dominant position of American aircraft manufacturers: the land mass of the United States made air transport the favoured mode of travel; a 1942 Anglo-American agreement has giventhe responsibility for aviation improvements to the US; and World War II had left America with an advanced and well structures aeronautical industry." (Nicholls, 2001) Hence, Airbus’s Mission Statement states “For the purpose of strengthening European co-operation in the field of aviation technology and thereby promoting economic and technological progress in Europe, to take appropriate measures for the joint development and production of an airbus."
In 1959 Hawker Siddeley, a group of British manufacturing company, had advertised an "Airbus" version of the Armstrong Whitworth AW.660 Argosy aircraft, which would "be able to lift as many as 126 passengers on ultra-short routes at a direct operating cost of 2d. per seat mil...

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... Grounded the Airbus A380?"
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