FedEx has signed up to buy 10 as freighters, but Airbus has not lured an American passenger carrier to order the plane. The company has also not added any new customers this year. Forgeard has said Airbus is in negotiations with four carriers; one of them is rumored to be in China. The company says it believes that it will meet its goal of signing one new customer a year.
"We have a rather hefty order book," Champion said, "and the issue is to find slots for new customers."
The A380 has a list price of US$250 million to US$280 million, depending on the features. Analysts say Airbus, like Boeing, offers discounts and other sales incentives to fill its order book.
Airbus likes to promote the A380 as a plane that could transform air travel by offering passengers more space. It has shown mock-ups of travelers relaxing around a bar, with staircases leading between levels. But skeptics say that in order to make the plane economically viable, airlines will probably cram it with many more seats than the 555 that Airbus advertises, perhaps as many as 840.
Airbus executives were reluctant to be drawn into discussions about the number of seats or the sales price at an event meant to celebrate how the plane is assembled, not how it is selling.
Indeed, the production of the A380 is a model of European integration. The largest parts of the fuselage are made in France and Germany; the wings in Britain; and parts of the tail section in Spain.
They are transported to Toulouse, in southwestern France, on a flotilla of ships and barges; then they are transferred to trucks and trailers to be hauled through city streets to the plant under cover of darkness. Once a plane is assembled, it will be flown to Hamburg to have the cabin installed.
The system is not without pitfalls. In Bordeaux, barges must carry chunks of the fuselage up the Garonne River under an 18th-century bridge that offers scant clearance. Airbus has installed padding on the underside of the bridge to prevent accidental scratches.
A bigger problem has cropped up in Britain, where the wings are manufactured in Broughton and transported down the River Dee to a harbor in Wales. Airbus says the port must be dredged to accommodate the Chinese-made cargo ship that carries the wings to France. But environmental authorities there are resisting.
Champion said he was confident that Airbus would negotiate a compromise. Given the political symbolism attached to the project, it is hard to imagine that such a dispute would be allowed to ground it.
Now that Airbus has lifted the veil from its long-awaited airplane, the pressure will mount to put the A380 in the air. Airbus officials say they expect it to make its debut at the Paris Air Show next year.
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