How does Airbus give names to its planes?

Airbus A330 is bigger than A320, makes sense, A340 is even bigger and A380 bigger than them all, makes sense, right? However, A310 is bigger than A320 and A300 is even bigger than A300. How and why? What’s the logic?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to have A1xx names for smaller ones, A2xx for medium and A3xx for the biggest ones?

they just seem to be in order of introduction. A300 came out in 1972, A310 in 1982, A320 in 1987, and so on. edit: except for the A380 preceding the A350.

Boeing pretty much does the same thing. The only real break in the pattern was when they bought McDonnell-Douglas and re-branded the MD90 as the 717.

They’ve tended to be chronological by series, A300 in 1972, A310 in 1982, A320 in 1987, etc. It gets a bit confusing in that the A318, A319, and A321 are derivatives of the A320, And the A380 is completely out of sync; I think they just wanted the highest number for their biggest plane.

There’s a chart here that shows first flight dates for each type.

Yep. The 727 was smaller than the 707. The 737 is bigger than both of those and the 747 is ginormous. But the 757 is a mid-size jet much smaller than the 747 jumbo. And the 767 is a large, wide-body jet much larger than the 757 but still smaller than the 747.

The 777 and 787 Dreamliner repeat the pattern with the former being a mid-size plane and the 787 being a wide-body. (But still not as big as a 747.)

IOW, Boeing just picks the next 7x7 number for whatever new product is rolling out of Renton that decade.

According to Wiki, the 380 designation was chosen because a) it represented visually the double deck design, and b) ‘8’ is a lucky number in Asian cultures where the plane was intended to be marketed. A citation for these claims is offered, FWIW.

That’s a bit misleading on the size comparisons. The 737 as it exists now is bigger than the 727 or 707, but when the number was chosen it was the smallest of the three. Using figures from Wikipedia, they had the following seating capacities:

707: 174-194
727: 125-155
737 (early versions): 103-130

777: 313-396
787: 242-330

It’s a little hard to compare like to like; different airlines configure their planes differently.

Say what?

Was the 737, as originally rolled out, really bigger than the 727? I can see how today that might be true in many cases, since there are stretch versions of the 737 that might rival or surpass the original 727 in size and capacity. Also, Boeing discontinued the latter more than 30 years ago, while next generation 737s continue to be built and delivered. But as originally conceived (quoth Wikipedia), it was originally intended to serve short-haul and “thin” routes, which I take to mean low passenger demand. The original model was definitely shorter, and from the looks of it I think it competed mainly with the Douglas DC-9.

And no way, no how, was the 737 ever bigger than the 707, which was Boeing’s marquee flagship aircraft until the the introduction of the 747.

I’d have said the same thing, but they’re closer than you think. I found sources for the seating capacity on a 707 being from 194 to 219 seats, and the largest stretched versions of the 737 being around 215 to 220. They probably pack the seats a little closer together now than they used to, but those two planes are roughly in the same ballpark.

Right – the 707 wasn’t really very big. It had four engines, but they were slender by today’s standards, so its proportions were roughly comparable to (say) today’s A340s – maybe that’s why we have trouble noticing how much larger the A340 is.

The A380 was numbered near the beginning of the 8 fad in airliner marketing. It’s the A380-800 too. The A350 was also going to start with the A350-800, although that was a commercial bust and the smallest will now be the -900. And when Airbus revamped its A330 line, it numbered the new ones starting at -800 (although that one is also not selling well).

Boeing also skipped to the number 8 in several places. The new 747 was the 747-8 rather than the 747-500. The 787 (which happened to be the next unused number in their pattern) starts at the 787-8.

I don’t know if the Asian lucky number thing actually factored into the choices, or if that’s just back-justification for a marketing fad.

The original A340 wasn’t even bigger. It was stretched later on (which wasn’t a rousing success), but the base version is actually the exact same plane as the A330, just with four engines instead of two. If you take the engines off, an A330-300 and A340-300 are identical. I think the wings were even built to be interchangeable, with three hardpoints depending on which type of plane it was eventually put on.

707v 747 Size comparison.

A Boeing series comparison

Given the (now ancient & fading) history of IBM totally owning the numbers 360 and 370 for mainframe computers, I wonder if the next clean-sheet Airbus designs will fill in those numbers as A360 and A370 or whether they’ll punt past them to the A390?
=== Second unrelated topic

For both Airbus and Boeing, they’re getting close to running out of possibilities with their current numbering schemes. Assuming no A360/370 is forthcoming, after A390 Airbus will be stuck. What’s next? Once they do the 797, Boeing will have filled the entire 7x7 series. What’s next?

For sure, marketing departments at both companies are thinking about that already.

Right now it’s looking like Boeing will announce what they expect to become the 797 within a year from today. In advance of a formal name Boeing and the industry are calling this project the Middle Of Market = MOM or New Midsize Aircraft = NMA. See Middle of the market - Wikipedia for a decent summary of the history and fairly current state of play.

There’s a small chance that, like the 757 & 767, it’ll be a two-fer: a matched pair of closely related but distinctly different models needing distinct model names/numbers.

If Boeing goes for the two-fer they’ll have a naming problem immediately. They wouldn’t want one to be the last of the old naming convention (797) and the other be the first of the new convention (808 ???). Which might result in both introducing the new convention, whatever that will be, leaving the 797 label unused.

Or they could resurrect the number intended for the Boeing SST, the 2707.

Maybe they’ll move to using letters like they do for aircraft under development; e.g. the 787 was called “7E7” during development.

They’re already using A400+ nomenclature for the Atlas military transport so I’m guessing their civil aircraft will follow suit. A410, etc.

It’s hard to appreciate these days just how much bigger the 747 was when it first flew. It really was the JUMBO JET.

That was a nod to the intended cruising speed, Mach 2.7. As well as being a way to semi re-use the 707 label that was still their flagship at the time. Neither of those are considerations today.

Yaay hexadecimal!

787, 797, 7A7, 7B7, 7C7, 7D7, 7E7, 7F7,

PROGRAM INTERRUPT 23H::INTEGER OVERFLOW!!
ABORT, RETRY, FAIL?

:smiley: