My first attempt at starting a thread, so please be nice to me!!!
The airliner industry (above 100 seats) has become dominated by Boeing and Airbus...could it all have been different?
January 1976. BA001 takes off from London Heathrow on its inaugural flight to New York JFK. Crowds of enthusiasts join U.S. Secretary of Transportation, William Coleman and Mayor of New York, Abraham D. Beame to welcome the plane. With the US still in the Breton Woods accord, and US support for Israel kept to a minimum, Saudi Light was trading at $3 a barrel.
After JFK's formation of the National Supersonic Transport committee, Najeeb Halaby, the director of the FAA, had presided over a heated early committee meeting. With the majority decision to play it safe, the committee was going to subsidize a 150 seat Mach 2.2 aircraft with a range of 4,000 miles. The Concorde-beating Mach 3, 250 seat option would receive a small amount of research funding however.
Back to 1976, BAC/Aérospatiale were playing catch up to Tupolev, but had a growing order book; and despite Boeing's Model 773 being a couple of years from launch, it had a healthy order book from loyal customers. Airbus (A300), Lockheed (L-1011) and McDonnell Douglas (DC-10) looked on cautiously to see how their their wide body, subsonic strategies would cope with the entrance of the supersonics...
The airliner industry (above 100 seats) has become dominated by Boeing and Airbus...could it all have been different?
January 1976. BA001 takes off from London Heathrow on its inaugural flight to New York JFK. Crowds of enthusiasts join U.S. Secretary of Transportation, William Coleman and Mayor of New York, Abraham D. Beame to welcome the plane. With the US still in the Breton Woods accord, and US support for Israel kept to a minimum, Saudi Light was trading at $3 a barrel.
After JFK's formation of the National Supersonic Transport committee, Najeeb Halaby, the director of the FAA, had presided over a heated early committee meeting. With the majority decision to play it safe, the committee was going to subsidize a 150 seat Mach 2.2 aircraft with a range of 4,000 miles. The Concorde-beating Mach 3, 250 seat option would receive a small amount of research funding however.
Back to 1976, BAC/Aérospatiale were playing catch up to Tupolev, but had a growing order book; and despite Boeing's Model 773 being a couple of years from launch, it had a healthy order book from loyal customers. Airbus (A300), Lockheed (L-1011) and McDonnell Douglas (DC-10) looked on cautiously to see how their their wide body, subsonic strategies would cope with the entrance of the supersonics...