The A320 family didn't just change the game - it rewrote the rules, leaving an enduring legacy soaring high above the rest.
By: Gareth
Published On: 10 November 2023, 9.00pm (GMT +8)
An Airbus A320NEO, a new version of the original A320.
Valentine's Day in 1987 was more than just a day for love.
On 14 February 1987, the first ever Airbus A320-100 rolled off the assembly line at the Airbus factory in Toulouse to thunderous applause from engineers, mechanics, designers, and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. A week later, on the 22nd, F-WWAI lined up at the end of Runway 14L in Toulouse Blagnac Airport. Airbus’ Senior Test Pilot, Jacques Rosay, advanced the thrust levers and placed his left hand on a side stick, an apparatus never seen before on a commercial aircraft.
100 knots… V1… Rotate.
A routine that millions of pilots would go through in the nearly 40 years since. The birth of the Airbus A320 was a remarkable achievement for aviation technology and the beginning of a bitter duopoly with Boeing.
But we’re not here to discuss the beauty of the first flight of the A320 aircraft series that would go on to transform billions of lives and become the best-selling commercial aircraft type of all time, however romantic those 3 hours and 23 minutes may have been. What I truly find remarkable about the A320 family (including the A318, A319, A320, and A321) and its NEO variations is how much the series contributed to cockpit innovation, and changed the operation of cockpits forever. So, how did the A320 change aviation?
The New Deal in cockpits
The A320 cockpit. Photo: Airbus (www.airbus.com)
Airbus promised pilots a new, comfortable, pilot-centric cockpit design, and it certainly kept to its word.
I’m not talking about the use of glass cockpits. By the 80s, using electronic displays instead of analog gauges had become old news, with its use in the Boeing 747-400, 757-200, and 767-300. Although the older generation of pilots detested these instruments, with former British Airways Captain John Hutchinson proclaiming it “Poncey glass cockpit rubbish…(without) proper instruments, needles, and dials”, the advantages of glass cockpit designs in reducing pilot workload and making information more accessible to pilots was apparent. It was not the A320 which popularised glass cockpits, and glass cockpits were not the unique selling points of the A320 cockpit. So what was it?
The answer is: The use of a side stick.
Side sticks had been used since the 1950s when fighter pilots complained about having to control the aircraft with a stick in between the legs. And there were no complaints in the military world when control columns moved from the front to the side of pilots. In commercial aviation, however, all aircraft used yokes, which had been the standard for nearly half a century. So why was Airbus so eager to break tradition by making use of a side stick in passenger aircraft?
To put it simply, it’s more comfortable to have nothing in front of your legs than to have a yoke. A stick on the side allows for increased legroom, and, most famously, the introduction of a tray table. For the first time, pilots were able to eat off a table that slid out in front of them, instead of balancing meal trays on their laps. And it was much easier to interact with the console and stretch out their legs - a yoke partially obstructed the view of the avionics.
Looking at the opening picture, it is clear that the side stick design of the A320 has provided much more comfort to pilots. The additional legroom paved the way for electronically reclining seats that eventually made their way into business class cabins. So the next time you press a button to recline your seat, remember that this technology began not in a passenger experience R&D lab, but in an R&D lab for cockpit seat design.
The side stick design has proven to be exceptionally successful and has been adopted by other manufacturers such as Sukhoi in the Superjet 100 as well as the Dassault Falcon 6X, 7X, and 8X models.
The popularisation of electric flight controls
Now that we have finished discussing at length the advantages of the side stick design introduced by the A320, allow us to explore another innovation - the use of fly-by-wire technology.
Just like glass cockpits, fly-by-wire wasn’t invented by Airbus - the Concorde was equipped with electronically controlled ailerons and elevators for pitch and roll when it was designed in the late 1950s. But it was far from a major selling point at the time - people were interested in Concorde for its speed and efficiency, not because it used electricity to move control surfaces instead of hydraulic pressure.
This begs the question: Why did the A320 make fly-by-wire popular, nearly 30 years after the technology was first conceptualised?
To answer that, we need to understand that fly-by-wire is a collective term for many different technologies used in the calibration of control surfaces. The technology used in the Concorde was vastly different from the version adopted by Airbus.
The Concorde’s fly-by-wire design was comparatively primitive for today’s standards, as one would expect from a design first sketched in the 1950s and brought to the scrapyard in 2003. However, instead of a primary means of flight control, the use of electronic signals to transmit pilot inputs was more a form of assistance. Aerospatiale and BAC, the developers of the aircraft, justified their decision by arguing that transmission of pilot inputs by a web of hydraulic tubes and pulley cables was too slow should there be a need to adjust control surfaces quickly to maintain aerodynamic stability during supersonic flight. In these engineers’ minds, the use of electricity was simply a means to get a response from flight controls faster.
Airbus improved on this system when it launched the A300 in 1970, and thereafter the A310 as well. These pioneering Airbus models used the traditional hydraulic pulleys to move elevators and ailerons, but made use of electronic signalling for secondary flight controls such as the rudder, flaps, and slats. However, there were calls within the company, most notably by aeronautical engineer Roger Béteille, to take electronic signalling to the next level. Instead of simply using electricity to transmit pilot inputs and translate these to the movement of control surfaces, Béteille suggested that the signals should first travel to a computer which would determine if such an angle of elevon deflection would be safe. This eventually led to the development of flight envelope protection, which limits the bank angle to 67 degrees.
Flight envelope protection is one of the most influential consequences of the A320’s new fly-by-wire system and has even been adopted by rivals Boeing in their 777 and 787 models. The use of a computer to receive pilot inputs before transmitting them to control surfaces takes safety to a new level with the ability to override unsafe inputs. This reduces the risk of stalling due to unsafe bank or pitch angles, and prevents pilots executing unsafe manoeuvres.
Flight envelope protection has saved many lives and prevented numerous accidents. To date, there have only been three accidents involving aircraft with flight envelope protection. Qantas Flight 72 and Air France Flight 447 crashed due to erroneous data from computers. But if an Airbus pilot were to push the side stick down into a steep dive deliberately, it would be impossible. Germanwings Flight 9525? That was caused by autopilot input, not side stick movement. Critics of the safety of flight envelope protection argue that there should be an override button to allow crew to perform dangerous manoeuvres outside of the flight envelope, pointing to China Airlines Flight 006 as an example. It is indeed true that an aircraft with flight envelope protection would not have been able to recover from the roll. However, in the words of an Airbus spokesperson:
“An A320 in the situation of Flight 006 would not have fallen out of the sky in the first place: the envelope protection would have automatically adjusted the thrust on the other engine to maintain level flight despite the drag of a stalled engine.”
The new 757/767?
A Boeing 767-400ER.
A discussion on the A320 cannot be complete without mentioning the NEO versions.
The ability of narrowbodies to fly long-haul routes was first demonstrated by the A320 family in 1988 when it was certified by the FIA for ETOPS-120 operation. Since then, the newly-engined versions have surpassed their ancestors in fuel efficiency, with the latest A321NEO XLR (Xtra-Long-Range) capable of up to 8700km of continuous flight. This gives airlines the remarkable ability to fly narrow-body aircraft on traditional wide-body routes - the ideal solution for long-distance routes with insufficient demand to fill wide-bodies. Scandinavian Airlines makes use of the A320 heavily to fulfil this purpose, flying the A320NEO family to far-flung destinations such as New York, Boston, and Washington DC. Only destinations on the US West Coast warrant the use of the wide-body A330.
The existence of the A320NEO family to serve as a mid-market aircraft allows it to replace the ageing Boeing 757s and 767s operated by US airlines since the late 1980s. These include traditional Boeing customers such as Delta and American Airlines. Delta has increased its A330 and A350 stock to replenish the retiring 767s, and American has similarly purchased hundreds of A320s in the last decade. Once considered the underdog in the American market, Airbus has sold A320s to every US airline except Southwest (with JetBlue even making its fleet entirely out of A320CEO and NEO models) and is becoming an increasingly popular choice as a replacement for 757s and 767s. Only United Airlines is still using Boeing to replace Boeing, recently ordering over 300 B787-8 and B787-10 models.
Conclusion
An Airbus A321-200.
The A320 and its evolutionary offspring have left an indelible mark on the world of aviation. While its first flight in 1987 marked a pivotal moment in the industry, it's the continuous innovation in cockpit design and flight control systems that truly sets the A320 family apart. The introduction of the side stick revolutionised the comfort and functionality of cockpit layouts, providing pilots with improved legroom, the convenience of tray tables, and enhanced visibility of critical avionics. Moreover, the adoption of fly-by-wire technology, with its groundbreaking flight envelope protection, has elevated safety standards to unprecedented levels. These advancements, coupled with the ability of the A320NEO family to transform narrow-body aircraft into long-haul workhorses, have earned Airbus a well-deserved reputation for excellence. So, as we marvel at our reclining seats and long-distance narrow-body flights, let's not forget that it all began with the Airbus A320, proving that sometimes, the most remarkable innovations come from building upon existing technologies.