A Global Company

Make sure your volume is on: "...The wing was going to be designed at Filton..."

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‘I worked for BAC USA Inc, which was the company that had just been set up, because we changed from Bristol Aeroplane Company during my short career, to Bristol Aircraft Limited, and then became part of this bigger thing called British Aircraft Corporation, by joining up with Vickers and English Electric, and Hunting as well came in, and this is where the Hunting 107 became the BAC 1-11 aeroplane.’
‘I moved over to Airbus, or at least the A320 Project. The wing project had been run from Hatfield, and they had been involved with the design of the A300 and A310 wing, and the major components were assembled up in Chester, as it was known then, it’s now known as Broughton factory.’
‘But the management of it was transferred during the 1980’s down to Filton with a chap called Bob McKinley, (who had technical responsibility for Concorde at Fairford but was transferred to Hatfield in 1976). The wing was going to be designed at Filton as opposed to Hatfield, and the Hatfield site was running down to be honest, it was concentrating on other things (like the 146 aircraft) at the time. The Airbus Programme required the wing, although it’s a British responsibility, to be valued always in dollars. Airbus sell aeroplanes in dollars, and we of course make them in pounds, we pay our chaps pound notes, and we wanted to offset the dollar exchange risk by putting some packages of work on the wing, ‘cause we knew we couldn’t make all of it. We could design, we could certainly scheme it and mostly detailed design it, but we couldn’t produce all of it in the United Kingdom, certainly couldn’t produce it all inside BAC.’

Credit: Filton Community History
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