# Nobody Wanted the First 16 Airbuses By Peter Plötner (https://www.towardsjoyandpeace.com/about/) · Published 2026-08-28 Canonical: https://www.towardsjoyandpeace.com/essays/catching-up-without-copying/ In the mid 1970s Airbus had 16 finished airliners parked at Toulouse that nobody wanted to buy. It went on to pass Boeing, and the climb never came from building a better 747 (its one direct try, the A380, never earned back its development money): it bet on a requirement nobody had written down (2 engines when serious meant 3 or 4), bought its engine ready-made from GE instead of designing one, and won the crew roster with cockpit commonality. For technical founders: why copying the leader is the expensive option, what the Airbus play would look like against Starship, and why the gap between being right and being seen to be right can be 20 years wide. --- Frank Borman, NASA astronaut portrait, 1964. 13 years later, running Eastern Air Lines, he took the free airplanes. Photo: NASA. If you're behind, copying the leader guarantees you arrive where they've already left. By Peter Plötner. Aerospace engineer and Wayfinder Life Coach. More about Peter → In the mid 1970s, Airbus had 16 finished airliners parked at Toulouse that nobody wanted to buy. They're called whitetails. Built, painted white, no airline's name on the tail, no customer coming. The company was a few years old, it had bet everything it had on one airplane, and the airplane was sitting on the concrete in the sun. Airbus went on to pass Boeing. It took another 27 years, and the climb never came from building a better 747. Boeing had been building airplanes since 1916. Its first hit in the airliner business took 42 years: the 707, in 1958. Its most famous try before that, the 247, sold 75 copies. Airbus started in 1970, 54 years behind, had a widebody in service by 1974, and had its first hit by 1978. ## The move they made when it was nearly over In August 1977 Airbus did something close to desperate. It offered Eastern Air Lines 4 A300s to use free for 6 months. Eastern's chief executive was Frank Borman, who had commanded Apollo 8 and read from Genesis while going around the Moon, and who now had an airline to keep alive. He took the airplanes. Eastern's crews trained in France that November, and the first A300 entered service on December 13, 1977. Then Borman looked at the fuel bill. The A300 was burning about 30 percent less than the TriStars he already had. He ordered 23. That order is usually named as the moment Airbus stopped being a European experiment and became a competitor. It didn't come from a better sales deck. It came from putting the thing in somebody's hands and letting the numbers do the arguing. ## Why the airplane was worth betting on The A300 flew in 1972 as the world's first twin-engine widebody. Everyone else was building widebodies with 3 and 4 engines, because that's what a serious long-haul airliner obviously had. Airbus bet that engines were getting good enough that 2 would do. One fewer engine to buy, and one fewer to maintain for the next 25 years. Look at what airlines buy now. The 777, the 787, the A330, the A350, all twins. The bet became the whole industry. A second bet hid inside that one. The 1967 plan had Rolls-Royce designing a brand-new engine for the A300. Rolls-Royce's attention went to an engine for Lockheed instead, a program whose costs later broke the company. Airbus watched the risk build, shrank the airplane in 1968, and re-sized it around an engine that already existed, General Electric's CF6, developed for the DC-10. So the young company never designed an engine at all. The most expensive part was already developed and paid for by American programs. Airbus spent its 4 years on the airframe. Then the A320 in 1988, the first airliner with full digital fly-by-wire. That bet nearly came apart in public 3 months in. In June 1988 an A320 flew a low pass at an airshow near Mulhouse, came in lower and slower than planned, and settled into the trees past the end of the runway. Of the 136 people on board, 3 died. The crash was filmed from the crowd, the film ran everywhere, and the fight over what happened started the same week. The official report said the crew flew too low with the engines at idle. The captain blamed the airplane. Some people still don't consider that question settled. Airbus held the bet anyway, and fly-by-wire is now in every Airbus, and in Boeing's 777 and 787. Underneath the A320's technology sat a quieter decision that earned more than the fly-by-wire did. Airbus made its cockpits behave almost the same across the family, so a pilot rated on one Airbus can move to another on a short course instead of a full new rating. That's not an airplane feature. It's an airline payroll feature. It shows up in the training budget and in the crew scheduling office, which are two of the places an airline actually feels pain. Airbus didn't win the airplane. It won the crew roster. ## The numbers on the other end 2003: Airbus delivered more aircraft in a year than Boeing for the first time, 33 years after it was founded. October 2025: the A320 family passed the 737 as the most delivered jetliner in history, at 12,260 aircraft. It took 37 years to overtake a program that had been running for 58. None of that came from copying. And the one time Airbus did try to build a better 747, the market said no. The A380, launched in 2000, was bigger than the jumbo and aimed straight at the hub-to-hub flying Boeing had owned for 30 years. Production ended in 2021 after about 250 aircraft, and the program never earned back its development money. What beat it was the shift to smaller twins flying point to point, the descendants of Airbus's own 1970 bet. ## So when does somebody copy Starship? Hopefully never. Starship is SpaceX's answer to SpaceX's requirements. A satellite constellation that needs constant launching. A Mars goal. A factory in Texas. A tolerance for failing loudly on camera that an organization spending public money doesn't have and can't buy at any price. Copy the architecture and you arrive around 2040 at the spot SpaceX stood on in 2026. You'll have spent 14 years solving a problem that moved while you were building. The Airbus move is the other one. Find the requirement nobody has written down yet, and be the one already building for it when everybody realizes. In 1970 that requirement was “two engines are enough,” and it sounded slightly reckless at the time. And that was Europe's move. Europe has already come from 54 years behind against an American giant once, without copying. The play needs two parts. The first is the requirement Starship's architecture doesn't serve. The second is a CF6, an engine you can buy instead of design, and that shelf is only starting to fill. Blue Origin sells its big engine to ULA. Ursa Major sells engines and launches nothing. The day a proven engine can be ordered the way Airbus ordered the CF6, the biggest cost and the biggest risk of a new rocket come off the table, and Airbus's 4 years from founding to service stops sounding like a different era. The clock matters here too. The 707 had been flying passengers for 12 years before Airbus even existed. Starship hasn't had its 707 moment yet, the years of routine, boring service that make a leader look permanent. So the clock on this race hasn't started. When somebody does place the bet, the Airbus numbers say what to expect. It looks wrong for the first years, proves right inside a decade, the way the twin engines did, and takes something like 33 years to lead. Whoever places it has to be willing to live on that clock, and to be judged against the wrong number the whole way. Put dates on it. Say Starship reaches routine service in 2027. If somebody then runs the Airbus play on the same clock, the dates fall out like this: founded around 2039, flying by 2043, proven right by about 2049, ahead in the 2070s. What the requirement is, the “two engines are enough” of 2026, I genuinely don't know. Tell me where I'm wrong. ## Copying is the expensive option If you're behind, the instinct is to copy the leader. It feels like the safe move, because somebody already proved it works. It's one of the least safe moves available. What you're copying is their answer to their constraints, built for their moment and their tolerance for risk. By the time you have it, they don't need it anymore, and you've spent your best years arriving somewhere that's already empty. So the useful question isn't how to catch up. It's what will be obvious in 6 years that sounds slightly silly today, and whether you're already building for it. Airbus's version of silly was taking two engines off a long-haul airliner. There's a smaller lesson in the Borman story too, and it's usable this week. Airbus didn't win Eastern with a presentation. It handed over 4 airplanes and let the fuel numbers do the work. If you can't argue somebody into it, see whether you can let them hold it. ## The 33 years That number looks discouraging until you check what it's measuring. Airbus didn't spend 33 years being wrong. The A300 bet was proven good within about a decade, as the rest of the industry quietly started building twins. What took 33 years was the scoreboard: order books, fleet decisions, training pipelines, all the slow machinery that turns being right into being ahead. So the gap between being right and being seen to be right can be 20 years wide. Worth knowing before you look at your own numbers and decide the bet failed. Which one are you actually looking at right now, the bet or the scoreboard? ## Frequently asked questions ### How long did Airbus take to overtake Boeing? Airbus was founded in 1970 and first out-delivered Boeing in a calendar year in 2003, which is 33 years. Boeing had a 54-year head start: it was founded in 1916, and its first commercially successful airliner was the 707 in 1958, 42 years in. Airbus reached its first hit, the A300 after the Eastern Air Lines order, in about 8. The A320 family passed the 737 as the most delivered jetliner in history in October 2025, at 12,260 aircraft, 37 years after the A320 entered service. ### How did Airbus catch up without copying Boeing? By betting on requirements that weren't obvious yet. The A300 was the first twin-engine widebody at a time when everyone else built 3 and 4 engine aircraft. The A320 brought digital fly-by-wire, and cockpit commonality across the family let airlines move pilots between types cheaply, which is a customer cost advantage rather than a feature on the airplane. ### What was the Eastern Air Lines deal? In August 1977, with 16 unsold A300s parked at Toulouse, Airbus offered Eastern Air Lines 4 aircraft free for 6 months. Eastern's chief executive Frank Borman found the A300 burned about 30 percent less fuel than his TriStars and ordered 23. It's widely treated as the moment Airbus became a serious competitor. ### Should a company behind the leader copy the leader's product? Copying means building the leader's answer to the leader's constraints, and arriving years after they've moved on. The pattern that worked for Airbus was to build for a requirement that hadn't been written yet, so that when the market turned, the airplane already existed. Airbus's own A380, its one direct attempt at the 747's market, ended production in 2021 after about 250 aircraft without earning back its development money. ### Why did it take 33 years for Airbus to pass Boeing? Being right and being seen to be right are separated by the slow machinery of a market: order books, fleet decisions, training pipelines. The A300's twin-engine bet was validated within roughly a decade, but the delivery crown took until 2003. --- One thing that closes soon. I just earned my certification as a Wayfinder coach, and to mark it I am giving away my full 3 month coaching package to 1 person, free. It is the same package paying clients get: a session every 2 weeks, support in between by message or voice, and the method itself, so you can run it again on your own later. No homework. I read every application myself and they close on September 20. If you have been chasing a leader for a while and copying them has not closed the gap, the application is here and takes about 5 minutes. The companion pieces are They Flew It 1,700 Times. It Barely Changed. on the loop that actually improves a design, and Which Robot Has the Best Hip? on copying the reasoning instead of the answer. If you want a first reading on where you are running somebody else's requirements, the Spec Check is 4 questions and takes about a minute.