The A330 airbus – the same model as the aeroplane which went down on 1 June – was four hours into its flight to the French capital when it hit heavy turbulence, an Air France statement said.
The company says that from a pilot's point of view, the new plane operates in the same way as existing Airbus planes, which it says is a selling point for airlines because they do no need to retrain their crew to fly them.
Airbus is doing the same.
The president of Boeing's French subsidiary, Yves Galland, said he watched the televised takeoff and "shared the emotion of the people of Airbus .But, speaking on LCI television, he also reiterated Boeing's argument that Airbus has overestimated the market for jumbo jets, which he called "quite weak". "We don't have the same analysis of the market as Airbus," he said.
Whatever the cause of the crash yesterday is determined to be, the cost of losing the Airbus-made plane will be about the same for the insurers.
Airbus, with 44,000 employees, might seem destined for much the same, but it says holding the line is the right strategy as business struggles to calculate the world's new risks and realities.
Essentially, the same choice was made in 2006, when BAE sold its 20 per cent stake in Airbus to EADS to focus on the US defence market.
It compares with one published by Airbus in September, which predicted sales of 25,000 commercial planes over the same period, with a market value of $3.1 trillion.
Of the six Airbus planes to be inspected, two are A300-600's owned by American Airlines, the same model that crashed shortly after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport after the vertical part of the tail fell off.
