Looking at things now it's obvious that this is what the market needed, but at the time the men who had the ideas were considered visionaries: Henri Ziegler, president of Sud-Aviation, Roger Beteille, technical manager of the Airbus programme at Sud-Aviation, Franz-Joseph!.
Strauss, Bavarian prime minister and president of Deutsche Airbur and Felix Kracht, senior vice president of sales and production of Deutsche Airbus. .
Work on the first aircraft began late in 1971 and made its first flight in October of 1972. Air France was first with the order of 6 and requested that they be stretched into a 250-seat version, the A300B2 and off it went into ful-scale production. By the end of 1975 Airbus had 10% of the market and a total of 55 aircrafts on order, including orders from three foreign airlines. But following this success the company failed to obtain other orders for 16 months. Negotiations with Western Airlines hoped to become the breakthrough into the North American market, but fell through. However Airbus was pretty pleasured to the fact that they were being seriously considered. Within weeks Eastern Airlines came to Airbus for bidding on a fleet renewal and ended up leasing four A300B4s. Things then began to move quickly. Within two years Airbus had 133 firm orders and 88 options, worldwide. Market share had risen to 26% by value, and at the end of 1979, Airbus had 256 orders from 32 customers and 81 aircraft in service with 14 operators. The A300 became known as a reliable workhorse and lived up to the claims as being superior in comfort and meeting the expectations of many diverse and demanding airlines. Then in April of 1979 Eastern Airlines confirmed an order due to the success of the lease from the first four. This gave reassurance to many other airlines in going with a European aircraft being that Eastern Airlines was a U.S. company. .
Next introduced was the A310 in July 1978 it was a shortened version of the A300 seating 218 passengers in a standard, two class configuration.
