56 The Aircraft of British Aerospace and BAE SYSTEMS 1977 - 2017
views of Norman Tebbit, the Secretary of
State for Industry, BAe managed to wrest
£250m from the Government, which was
to be recouped by a levy on sales. This
sum was not the total amount needed as
BAe had to invest some £200m of its own
for the project. To have gone ahead with
the earlier idea of final assembly and
flight testing of the A320s at Filton would
have required additional investment of
£100m (at 1983 prices).
The A320, which finally went ahead in
March 1984, tackled the dominance of
the twenty-year-older Boeing 737 design
head-on by innovation - introducing ‘Fly
by wire’ and sidesticks instead of the
conventional flying controls to the
flightdeck of a civil aircraft. These
innovations stole a march on Boeing’s
capabilities, attracting huge airline and
media interest. There was no mechanical
connection between the sidestick and
the flying surfaces and the Flight
Management System maintains the
aircraft within its envelope, necessarily
limiting angle of attack, airspeed and
deflection of flight controls. If the pilot
keeps the aircraft within the envelope
there is no intervention in control.
In December 2016, the A320 family
with the larger A321, the progressively
smaller A319 and A318 and improved
A320neo (new engine option) have
achieved more than 12,400 sales with a
backlog of more than 5,500. It is
produced at Toulouse, Hamburg, Tianjin
in China and Mobile, Alabama.
Production rates are planned to reach 60
per month, all aircraft flying on British-
made wings. The A320 family has proved
itself as a most successful competitor to
the world’s best-selling airliner, the
Boeing 737.
Airbus continued to expand its
portfolio of types with the A330/340 and
for all its success required huge
investment funded in part by
Government loans and in May 1987, the
UK Government provided BAe with a
£450 million loan towards its
participation in the A330/A340
programme. The A330 was a large
capacity, twin-aisle, medium-range,
twin-engined airliner while the four-
engined A340 was the long and
ultra-long-range version. The aircraft
shared the same fuselage and the same
wing, the most significant difference was
the number of powerplant. Fuselage
lengths of the A330 and A340 varied as
the types were developed. (Though the
A330 is still in production and the
re-engined, improved A330neo is to fly in
2017, production of the A340 ended
2012.) BAe called on Government
support for the A330/A340 and in May
1987 the Conservative Government
agreed a £450m loan to BAe for its
continuing involvement in Airbus.
With Hatfield’s closure, BAe Filton took
over overall design responsibility for the
A330/A340 wing while Broughton
continued to build them. The first A340
wings were completed in June 1990, the
first A330 wings in August 1991 and werethen transported to Bremen for
completion. In March 2000, the UK was
the first Government to invest in the
huge A380 when it offered £530m to be
repaid over 17 years to safeguard wing
manufacture at Filton and Broughton. By
January 2006 over 4,000 Airbus wing sets
had been manufactured at Broughton.
Initially Airbus wings had been flown out
of Manchester Airport and afterlengthening of Broughton’s runways
could be flown from there by Airbus
Beluga freighters, but owing to their size
the A380 wings could only be moved by
road and sea. The A380 flew in April 2005
and after a multitude of problems
involving the electrical wiring entered
service in October 2007, but by that time
BAE Systems was no longer an Airbus
partner. The huge
British-built wing of
the A380 flexing
under the weight of
its engines. (Airbus)