How Airbus A350XWB Was Made From Scratch

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Jeff Wise, How to Debug a Jet; Behind the scenes with the Airbus A350, the most sophisticated passenger airliners ever built. Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Feb 17, 2014.
www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... -debugging-the-a350

Quote:

"A modern airliner is a semi-autonomous system. Planes have an electronic nervous system that constantly monitors thousands of parameters internally and externally, communicates autonomously with navigation and maintenance networks around the globe, and assesses whether its pilots are flying it safely. * * * If a pilot tries to fly in a way that’s clearly dangerous, such as going into an aerodynamic stall, the plane won’t let her.

"Much of the early work was done not by Airbus but by its suppliers. While the company might look to the outside world like an aircraft manufacturer, it’s more of an integrator: It creates the overall plan of the plane, then outsources the design and manufacture of the parts, which are then fitted together.

Note:
(a) "Airbus Flight Test Engineer Patrick du Ché * * * [at] Toulouse-Blagnac Airport in southern France * * * an Airbus A350-XWB long-range widebody airliner—the very first of its kind. Sleek and nearly all white except for the lettering along its flank and the swirling blue-on-blue Airbus logo on the tail"
(i) Airbus A350 XWB
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A350_XWB
("A350" redirects here--the first A350; A350 XWB (extra wide body))
(ii)  Toulouse–Blagnac Airport
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toulouse–Blagnac_Airport
(Both Airbus and ATR [a French-Italian aircraft manufacturer headquartered in this airport] assemble aircraft at nearby facilities and test them from the airport)
(iii) The tail displays, like all other Airbus airliners, a PART of the logo, not the whole.

(b) "Earlier this year [2013 actually] the Federal Aviation Administration and its counterparts around the world grounded the Dreamliner for three months, the first time the US agency had done so in more than 30 years. Airbus doesn’t have to look to Boeing for cautionary tales. A decade ago a simple design miscalculation of the A380 superjumbo airliner required that miles of wiring be pulled from half-built planes and reinstalled. Along with engine supply problems and other mishaps, the snafu set production back more than two years, leading to $6 billion in losses and a wholesale corporate reorganization."
(i) Federal Aviation Administration was formed in 1958.
(ii) Airbus A380
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380
(Introduction  2007 with Singapore Airlines; Produced 2004–present; Number built 122 as of December 2013)

(c) "The engineering risk with the A350 isn’t that it will have chronic, life-threatening safety problems; it’s cost. Aeronautical engineering has come a long way since the de Havilland Comet, which suffered three in-flight breakups after its introduction in 1952 and was withdrawn from service. Today’s commercial airliners are amazingly safe; neither the A380 nor the 787, for all their problems, has been involved in a fatal accident."
(i) de Havilland Comet
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet
(was the first production commercial jetliner; May 2, 1952: took off on the world's first jetliner flight with fare-paying passengers and inaugurated scheduled service from London to Johannesburg; Mar 3, 1953: [world's] first fatal jetliner crash [in a failed attempt to take off]; broke up in mid-air on May 1953, Jan 10 and Apr 8, 1954 [due to catastrophic metal fatigue in the airframes, not well understood at the time; see introduction, section 7 Accidents and incidents])
(ii) de Havilland
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland
(founded in 1920 by Geoffrey de Havilland)

(d) "Throughout the development process, teams of engineers were brought in from suppliers to collaborate with Airbus counterparts in Toulouse in joint working groups called 'plateaux.' * * * A prime example of supplier collaboration can be found in Mexicali, Mexico, where Honeywell International has built a test facility"
(i) English dictionary:
plateau (n; French, from Middle French, platter, from plat flat; plural plateaus or plateaux)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plateau
(ii) French English dictionary:

The "plateaux" is the only plural form of "plateau," whose French definitions look similar to those in English.
plateauen.wiktionary.org/wiki/plateau
(section 2 French)

So I am clueless what "plateaux" here means.
(ii) Mexicali, Mexico
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexicali,_Mexico
([the name is] a portmanteau composed of "Mexico" and "California"