I agree, I’ve dealt a lot with Dassault Aviation, another French aviation company and seen many of their engineering drawings which are 100% metric, they do add inches in Maintenance Manuals for American maintenance people. I noticed our maintenance engineer would more easily deal with only the millmetre dimension and not use the inch one which might be some odd decimal inch (0,157”) or exactly 4 mm.
I think Airbus would operate the same way. Dassault systems developed the CATIA CAD software many aircraft manufacturers use http://www.3ds.com/products-services/catia/ I notice that Gulfstream Aviation (an American company) used the same software to develop their new G650, it was designed in Fractional inches just like Boeing! This has got be be a real pain in the neck, but if you’re making something on a computer controlled device, it does not really matter. Mike On 11 Feb 2014, at 08:58, Carleton MacDonald <carlet...@comcast.net> wrote: > I cannot imagine that Airbus designed and built in anything other than > metric; they just may have dumbed down the description to inches in an effort > to sell the planes in North America. > > Carleton > > From: Kilopascal [mailto:kilopas...@cox.net] > Sent: Monday, February 10, 2014 20:16 > To: U.S. Metric Association > Subject: First order, first flight (1970-1972) | Airbus, a leading aircraft > manufacturer > > http://www.airbus.com/company/history/the-narrative/first-order-first-flight-1970-1972/?contentId=%5B_TABLE%3Att_content%3B_FIELD%3Auid%5D%2C&cHash=22935adfac92fcbbd4ba4e1441d13383 > > From the beginning Roger Béteille insisted that a high level of technology > should be built into the A300 to give it the edge over competing aircraft. He > also decided that English should be the working language – and that > measurements should not be metric because most airlines already had > U.S.-built aircraft. Béteille had spent time listening to airlines such as > Air France and Lufthansa, as well as visiting U.S. airlines like United, TWA > and American. “I wanted to try to understand what the customers really > wanted,” he said, laying the groundwork for much of the future success of > Airbus where a culture of listening to customers has become endemic. > > Was this just an idea or did it really happen? France was supposed to > abandon metric in the 1950’s, but it never happened. > > Then there is this paragraph, just below the one posted above: > > The A300B given the go-ahead by France and Germany at Le Bourget in 1969 > would be smaller, lighter and more economical than its three-engine American > rivals. Its fuselage had been reduced from the original A300’s 6.4 metres in > diameter to 5.6m, its length from 53.92m to 48.3m. As a result it was 25 > tonnes lighter than the first planned A300. > > Why describe this plane in metric if the planes weren’t designed in metric > because the customers wanted them in USC? If the customers wanted USC, they > why not describe them in USC?
