The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday 8 June 2009
In the article below about the recent crash of an Air France plane, we said that the aircraft had made 18,870 flights. Rather, it had done 18,870 flight hours.
Before the presumed crash of Air France flight 447, the only fatalities involving an Airbus A330 had occurred during testing.
The wide-bodied, twin-engine passenger plane began commercial operation in 1993. It was designed to compete on long-haul routes with similar Boeing planes.
Seven crew were killed during a test flight in June 1994 while simulating an engine failure on takeoff at the Airbus factory in Toulouse.
There are two types of A330. The original was the 300 series, followed by the 200 series from 1998 onwards. The Air France plane is the 200, with up to 253 seats and a range of nearly 8,000 miles.
The registration of the missing plane is F-GZCP. It was built and delivered to Air France in 2005.
The aircraft had made 18,870 flights and its last maintenance check in the hangar took place on 16 April 2009, according to Air France.
In August 2001, an A330 operated by Air Transat suffered double engine failure while flying from Toronto, Canada, to Lisbon in Portugal. The captain reported the left engine failed, followed 10 minutes later by the right one. The plane was able to glide for between 17 and 18 minutes – the longest ever for a passenger jet – and made an emergency landing in the Azores. Human error and lack of automated computer checks stopped the crew from realising that fuel was leaking via a broken pipe.
The captain on the missing Air France plane had done 11,000 flight hours including 1,700 hours on Airbus A330 and A340 planes.
Of the two first officers, one had flown 3,000 flight hours, with 800 of them on the Airbus A330 and A340. The other had 6,600 hours, including 2,600 on the Airbus A330 and A340.
The Air France plane was powered by General Electric CF6-80E engines.
Airbus markets the A330 as "optimised for highest revenue generation and the lowest operating costs from regional segments to extended range routes".
The A330-200 is similar to the four-engined A340-200 and a shortened version of the A330-300.
With poor sales of the A340-200 (of which only 28 were built), Airbus decided to use the fuselage of the A340-200 with the wings and engines of the A330-300. This improved the economics of the plane and made the model more popular than the four-engined variant.
The A330-200 has sold strongly since its launch, outselling the Boeing 767 by 23 to nine in 2004. As a result, Boeing has asked both Rolls Royce and GE to design engines that would enable the 787 Dreamliner to be 15% more economical than the A330-200.