Airbus finally turns out the lights on trail-blazing A330 v1.0

The music has now officially stopped for Airbus ’s original “big twin”, the A330-300, with the OEM clearing out the eight remaining dormant orders in its December 2023 update. Cirium data shows that the A330-300 has the highest total orders/deliveries across the A330/A340 family, with 776 aircraft built and shipped. This equates to over third of the 2,148 total A330/A340 orders, and 43% of all the orders (1,771) for the four A330 variants.

The A330-300’s genesis was the 1970s “A300B9” stretch project of the original Airbus A300. This was subsequently renamed “TA9” (twin-aisle) before being designated “A340” (not a typo!) in the Airbus product nomenclature. The four-engined “TA11” was set to be the lead aircraft model, and initially took the designation “A330”, explained former VP strategic planning Adam Brown: “Then our salesmen came back and said that airlines would never get their brains around a twin having a 'four' in its name and the quad not, so we reversed the designations.”

Launched as a pair of aircraft types in June 1987, the A330-300 was dimensionally identical to the A340-300, but originally optimised for medium-range missions as Airbus focused on addressing the long-range sector with the quad. A340-200/300 deliveries began in early 1993, with the first A330-300 following (to Air Inter) at the very end of that year.

As the widebody twins advanced into extended-range overwater markets, Airbus – which by its own admission was initially too slow to react - progressively increased the A330-300’s payload/range capabilities and introduced the shorter, longer-range -200 variant (which also sired a production freighter and "A330-700" BelugaXL). Meanwhile deliveries of the A340 family concluded in 2012, with 377 sold.

The A330-300 became the first Airbus to have Rolls-Royce engines, a quarter of a century after the original “A-300” project had emerged powered exclusively by Derby’s products. As such, the A330 was also the first (and only) Airbus to be equipped with engines built by all of the "big three" engine OEMs.

When the Boeing 787 emerged in the early 2000s, the A330-300 seemed destined to be the basis of Airbus’s response to the all-new Dreamliner. But the proposed GEnx/Trent 1700-powered derivatives were quickly superseded by the A350 XWB cleansheet design, once it became painfully obvious to Toulouse that a derivative approach would be insufficient. Ironically, the A330-300 achieved its highest-ever annual backlogs after the 787 and A350 launches, reaching ~170-190 aircraft in 2011-2013.

The idea of a re-engined A330 was resurrected in 2014, with the launch of the A330neo, re-engined with Trent 7000 engines. Deliveries began in 2018 and total orders for the A330-300-sized -900 stand at 377, with a further 12 orders for the -200-sized -800.

The last A330-300 delivery took place in October 2022 - the final of four ex-HNA Group aircraft taken by ALTAVAIR for conversion to freighter by Elbe Flugzeugwerke GmbH . "A330ceo" production continues at low rates with the A330-200, which remains the military tanker-transport platform. However, Airbus has already hinted about plans to transition to an A330neo-based MRTT offering.