Airbus A350 Marks 10-Year Anniversary In Revenue Service

On a December day at Toulouse-Blagnac Airport toward the end of 2024, the apron is full of new aircraft, some ready to be picked up by their customers but many waiting for components. Airbus A350s are parked everywhere, even in front of the old Jean-Luc Lagardere site on the other side of the runway, once built for the A380 and now hosting an A321neo final assembly line. “We are disappointed,” says Julien Puyou, head of Airbus widebody programs.

Of course, there is no reason to be disappointed in the A350 per se. Ten years after the latest Airbus widebody entered service with Qatar Airways on Jan. 15, 2015, it is fair to say that the project has become a big operational and commercial success, despite its tumultuousness. Along with the Boeing 787, the A350 reshaped long-haul travel once again—and killed the A380 as an unintended side effect.

Moreover, given Boeing 787 quality issues and 777X delays, as well as the strongest widebody demand in a long time, Airbus is convinced that the harvest season for its big twin has arrived. The airframer just needs to figure out how to assemble and deliver more of the aircraft to customers faster.

For Puyou and his veteran colleagues, 2024 must have felt like a throwback to 2016, early in the A350 production ramp-up. Airbus delivered 49 of the aircraft that year on the way to its planned target rate of 10 per month. In 2019, the airframer finally reached that goal, and the program broke even on an operational basis for the first time as well.

It took Airbus five years to achieve that level—but the OEM was not able to maintain it. The COVID-19 pandemic changed everything and slashed demand for widebodies in particular. In 2024, the second or third year of post-pandemic recovery, depending on how you count, Airbus delivered just 33 A350s through November, far fewer than even at the crisis’s peak in 2020, when it delivered 59, and fewer than in any year since initial production began.

The slow pace of production recovery is what frustrates Puyou.

Concept and Development

Well before the first delivery, the A350 program experienced several unforeseen twists. Its development was triggered by competition with Boeing, which had launched studies into a new widebody that eventually morphed from the early-2000s “Sonic Cruiser” concept into today’s 787.

Whatever Boeing did, Airbus had to react. Its widebody lineup in the early 2000s consisted of the A330, an efficient and versatile twin that had big sales success in Asia and good incumbency in Europe but was less popular in the U.S. Airbus’ weak point was the increasingly uneconomical four-engine A340. The A380 had been launched in 2000 but not yet delivered. Production flaws and billions in cost overruns had brought Airbus to the brink, forcing it to institute a major cost-cutting program dubbed Power8. In the mid-2000s, the company was vulnerable, despite the growing success of the narrowbody A320 program.

Airbus leaders initially thought there was a quick and relatively cheap fix. All Airbus needed to do was modernize the A330 into the A350 by adding new engines and some other tweaks to make it more efficient, the argument went. It would appeal to the large A330 customer base, plus those operating A340s, by ensuring a great deal of commonality. A revamped A330-to-A350 also would be available sooner than a new Airbus or Boeing aircraft. It all seemed to make sense.

The market, however, did not buy it. Steven Udvar-Hazy, then-chairman of International Lease Finance Corp., made no secret of his view that Airbus’ plan would not give customers what they actually wanted.

Lessors were never going to be the main target audience for widebodies, given the relatively small numbers produced. Still, Udvar-Hazy’s opinion was valued then, as it is today. “I did not design the A350; I just redesigned it,” he once joked. Other players agreed with Udvar-Hazy’s view that the initial concept was just a “Band-Aid reaction” to the 787. Singapore Airlines was unusually clear that if Airbus wanted it to buy the A350, the airframer would have to offer something better.

In the early part of 2006, it became increasingly clear that the original idea was a nonstarter. Airbus officially announced the clean-sheet concept of what would become today’s A350 at the 2006 Farnborough International Airshow. The Airbus board finally approved the decision almost six months later, illustrating how difficult it was for the distressed company to move ahead with another multibillion-dollar development program when the troubled A380 had yet to enter service (and would not do so until October 2007).

In hindsight, the debates of 2006—and ultimately the decision to move ahead with the much more expensive A350 version—proved pivotal for the future of Airbus, considering how the long-haul aircraft market has developed in the 18 years since.