Airbus Industrie began as a consortium of European aviation firms to compete with American companies such as Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Lockheed. While many European aircraft were innovative, even the most successful had small production runs.inal assembly production is based at Toulouse, France; Hamburg, Germany; Seville, Spain; and, since 2009 as a joint-venture, Tianjin, China. Airbus has subsidiaries in the United States, Japan, China and India.