While Boeing’s new concepts were grabbing the headlines at the 1993 Paris Air Show that June, Airbus was quietly approaching a critical juncture in its history. It was determined not to lose the initiative to Boeing and, spurred on by the challenge the VLCT conundrum posed, moved quickly to consolidate the results of the UHCA studies it had originally commissioned from the three main consortium members: Aerospatiale, British Aerospace, and DASA.
All three had come up with very similar double-deck designs that included Aerospatiale’s ASX 500/600, which, as its designation suggests, was aimed at satisfying both the 500- and 600-plus-seat markets. BAe came up with a concept dubbed the AC14, while DASA’s P502/P602 had by now become as familiar a shape—in model form—as the A2000 on every Airbus show display. Airbus took the best characteristics of each of the three designs and, during that hot June of 1993, blended them into an amorphous group called Family 1. The concept was called 3E P500 to reflect both its 3E technology-demonstrator designation and its baseline capacity of more than 500 seats. The family consisted of two major versions, the 3E P500-100 and a stretch -200 variant with higher capacity.