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:[email protected]] 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 <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> &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?
