Although expensive to develop - think of a new Airbus design - it ought to be a good long-term investment because - again, like an Airbus - a Skylon is designed to be used over and over again.
But in November 2008, after Air France had reported to Airbus a series of incidents involving Pitot tube malfunctions because of high-altitude icing on its A340s between May and August of that year, Airbus amended its original recommendation of September 2007, saying that the newer Thales model had not been designed to resist icing and could therefore not provide a significant improvement.
After the war he designed civil aircraft: the Il-12 twin-engined passenger aircraft (1946), the Il-18 Moskva four-engined turboprop transport (1957), the Il-62 turbojet passenger carrier (1962), and the Il-86 airbus, which made its first flight in 1976.
Designed to be 20percentt more fuel-efficient, quieter and more comfortable than other commercial jets, and built for long-range flights, the 787 is central to Boeing's effort to retake momentum from Airbus, the European competitor that has gained on it over the last decade.
A commission for Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture of Asymptote to design their vision of a hotel airbus will go ahead, but an artist's conceptual vision of a Japanese-style capsule hotel inserted into a scale model of an atomic bomb will not.
Airbus said it would adapt its design to use a conventional nickel-cadmium battery instead in order to avoid any possible delays linked to the safety certification of the technology by aviation regulators.
That design and marketing approach was to characterize Airbus even after the A300/A310 family was formally discontinued in 2007.
The Euopean project, ENHANCE, coordinated by EADS Airbus, is a large, single and cohesive R&D initiative in the field Concurrent Engineering aimed at improving European Aeronautical industry competitiveness.
Despite the fact that only two airlines had expressed public interest in purchasing such a plane, Airbus was already pursuing its own large plane project.
Airbus has been talking about its Vahana flying autonomous vehicle project for a while now, but at this year's Geneva Motor Show, it's showing off a concept design created in partnership with Italdesign.
