Airbus A310
1982 airliner family
The Airbus A310 is a wide-body airliner designed and manufactured by Airbus Industrie GIE, then a consortium of European aerospace manufacturers.
Airbus had identified a demand for an aircraft smaller than the A300, the first twin-jet wide-body. On 7 July 1978, the A310 (initially the A300B10) was launched with orders from Swissair and Lufthansa. On 3 April 1982, the first prototype conducted its maiden flight, and the A310 received its type certificate on 11 March 1983.
Keeping the same eight-abreast cross-section, the A310 is 6.95 m (22 ft 10 in) shorter than the initial A300 variants, has a smaller wing, down from 260 to 219 m2 (2,800 to 2,360 sq ft), and a longer flying range up to 5,150 nautical miles (9,540 km; 5,930 mi). The A310 introduced a two-crew glass cockpit, later adopted for the A300-600 with a common type rating. It was powered by the same General Electric CF6-80 or Pratt & Whitney JT9D then PW4000 turbofan jet engines. It can seat 220 passengers in two classes, or 240 in all-economy. It has overwing exits between the two main front and rear door pairs.
In April 1983, the aircraft entered revenue service with Swissair, and competed with the Boeing 767-200, introduced six months before.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6471. The Library of Congress control number is sh2005003900. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978, 1982 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Airbus A310” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.