Abstract
This chapter traces the development of the aerospace industries in both Europe and the United States. We examine the reasons for American dominance of the civil aircraft sector from the early 1900s until the arrival of Airbus in 1970. The European industry is also looked at. Airbus must be seen as an international collaboration that arises out of the failure of European states to develop successful national strategies to compete with the United States. In the final section, we examine how changes in the international aerospace market from 1970 onward undermined US dominance and, inadvertently, provided Airbus with its opportunity to compete.
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Notes
Aerospace Industries Association, Maintaining a Strong US Aerospace Industry, Washington: AIA, 1991, p. 2.
David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg, ‘Technical change in the commercial aircraft industry, 1925–75’, in Nathan Rosenberg (ed.), Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 163.
Certainly for the British case, the industry had a very good scientific base. The problem lay in the inability to translate basic scientific work into commercially successful products. On the various reasons for this see, David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg, Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, ch. 5.
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Artemis March, The US commercial aircraft industry and its foreign competitors’, p. 22. This relationship is the central theme of the widely cited work on the aircraft industry by John Newhouse. See his, The Sporty Game, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
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© 1997 Steven McGuire
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McGuire, S. (1997). Aerospace Industries in Europe and America. In: Airbus Industrie. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372214_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372214_3
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