Here we have a German stamp celebrating new technology. Except now the technology was a multi country effort with origins in Great Britain. The resulting plane was no faster than what it proposed to replace. Not too promising you might say, but the designers were reading the zeitgeist correctly and the A320 family has the most orders of any jet airliner in history. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
There are two interesting things about the presentation of the A320 on this stamp. One is the date of issue, coming only 3 months after the plane received it’s certificate of airworthiness. Europe was littered with single country unsuccessful airplane designs at the time and they couldn’t have known yet how successful the A320 would become. It shows how dramatically important Europe viewed the program. The continent was spending a fortune importing Boeing airliners. Import substitution from a domestic could fix that. The second thing is including the flags of the Airbus consortium partners as equals. If things are presented that way enough times, people might believe.
Todays stamp is issue A635, a 60 Pfennig stamp issued by West Germany on May 5th, 1988. It was a two stamp issue in different denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 40 cents used.
The 150 seat airliner market in the 1970s was dominated by the Boeing 737 and the Douglas DC9 that dated from the 1960s. I did a stamp on the DC9 here, https://the-philatelist.com/2020/01/02/turkey-1967-showing-off-the-new-douglas-dc-9/ . The French Caravelle, the British Trident and the British BAC 111 had been unsuccessful in the market. Airbus’s first airliner the A300 was larger though they had a short version the A310 they were not having much luck with, as it was too much plane for the job. British Aerospace, Fokker in Holland, Dornier in Germany, and Aerospatiale in France formed a consortium outside of Airbus to work on a design under British design chief, Derek Brown. Brown had worked previously on a proposed Hawker update of the old Trident airliner. The airliner they proposed was no faster that what it hoped to replace and the big advancements were in the areas of fuel efficiency and pilot workload. This later area was important to Europe as their air forces were smaller and so they were not throwing off as many veterans to serve as pilots. Civilian trained pilots had many fewer flight hours and so fly by wire technology was incorporated into the “Joint European Transport or JET”. Reducing what was expected of pilots was copied by Boeing, the American air force was later shrinking as well. The airliner layout was similar to the 737 but the interior managed to be 6 inches wider.
Airbus saw the program as a threat, but saw the hole in their product line so brought the program in house still under Mr. Brown. Germany sought and got a bigger share of the work including assembly in Hamburg. Britain got more of their people in all facets of the program so as a way to preserve a separate British ability to make airliners. I mentioned that the A320 program is one of the most successful in history but notice that none of the original consortium players still exist as separate entities. The design relied heavily on subsidies from the Airbus partner countries to be brought to market. I bet the tax payers did not realize that even as successful and long lasting as the A320 would not be enough to save any of the companies. To better position for worldwide demand for the A320, assembly can now be specified by the customer in Alabama in the USA or in Tianjin in China. Sometimes multinationals forget where they come from and even what their purpose was.
Both the 737 and the Airbus 320 continue to be developed. For Airbus that means more efficient engines called A320 neo, for new engine option. The old version was re-branded A320 ceo for current engine option. The equivalent 737 are the NG and the troubled MAX. Both manufacturers are limited by the basics of a very old now air frame design, but there is a lot of expertise that wouldn’t translate easily to a really new design. Plus who would pay?
Last year Airbus announced with some fanfare that the A320 family of airliners had passed the 737 in total orders. As of 2020, Boeing still leads in number built at 10,575 versus 9,313. We will see if the future order advantage translates into actual planes.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast Derek Brown. I am sure he was proud of the A320 design but I wonder if he would have preferred it could have still been a Hawker and could have sustained a British aerospace industry. Hawker in the 1970s looked pretty viable also having the Harrier jump jet and the evergreen Hawk jet trainer. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.