The intense debate over where to place the A3XX final assembly site was finally boiled down to two sites, Toulouse and Hamburg. The Toulouse site, adjacent to Blagnac Airport, was the traditional home of Airbus assembly since the 1970s, but DASA had made a strong case for the A3XX, having recently modernized its Hamburg facilities to assemble the A319 and A321 variants of the A320 family. The Toulouse bid involved the construction of massive new facilities on the north side of the field, well away from the existing production site and the then-new Clement-Ader A330/A340 assembly building, which was four years old when this photo was taken in 1994. The complete site at that time covered 130 acres and was named after the Frenchman who, in 1890, had made a brief hop in a steam-powered, bat-winged “aeroplane.” Mark Wagner