What is the Airbus A320?

The A320 made its first flight on 22 February 1987 in Toulouse and entered service with Air France in April 1988. Airbus, which until then had only built wide-body twinjets (A300 and A310), wanted to compete with the Boeing 737 and the McDonnell Douglas DC-9/MD-80 in the best-selling segment of the market. To stand out, it bet on technology: the A320 was the first commercial aircraft with digital fly-by-wire flight controls, in which pilot commands pass through computers that protect the flight envelope, and it replaced the traditional control wheel with a small sidestick. The cockpit, with screens instead of dial instruments, became the basis for the entire later range.

On the same 3.95 m diameter fuselage, Airbus built a family with a common type rating: the stretched A321 (1994), the shortened A319 (1996) and the A318 (2003). The basic A320 is 37.6 m long, has a 34 m wingspan and carries between 150 and 180 passengers about 6,000 km with CFM56 or IAE V2500 engines. In 2016 the A320neo entered service, with new engines (PW1100G or LEAP-1A) and sharklet wingtips, cutting fuel burn by around 15% compared with the original A320ceo.

With more than 11,000 aircraft delivered and an order backlog of over 7,000 units, the A320 family overtook the 737 as the best-selling airliner in history in 2019 (data as of December 2024). It flies with almost every European and Asian low-cost airline and is built in Toulouse, Hamburg, Tianjin and Mobile (Alabama). Its longevity stems from the combination of an airframe that is simple to maintain, a common cockpit that lowers pilot training costs, and successive engine and avionics upgrades.