EADS, AIRBUS GROUP, AIRBUS SE: THE NAMES MATTER
The aircraft brand is older than today's corporate structure. In July 2000, Aerospatiale Matra, Germany's DASA and Spain's CASA combined to form EADS. The group took the Airbus name in stages: EADS became Airbus Group in January 2014, the stock-market listing name changed to Airbus in January 2017 and the formal group name changed after shareholder approval in April 2017. A source labelled EADS is therefore not automatically about a different aircraft manufacturer. [201, General information; corporate history and listing names]
Wikipedia provides a useful map of the changes, including the shift from a consortium to an incorporated company. For the dates in this account, the manufacturer's investor record provides the primary cross-check. Keeping the legal entity, the commercial-aircraft operation and the public brand separate avoids a familiar historical muddle: Airbus can celebrate its origins in the 1960s and 1970s without claiming that the present group already existed in its current form. [202, Introductory corporate chronology; 1970-2000 and 2000-2017 sections] [201, Company profile]