On a misty February morning in 1987, the first Airbus A320 rose from Toulouse-Blagnac Airport and carried with it the first fully digital fly-by-wire control system ever entrusted to a civil airliner. Vice President of Flight Division and chief test pilot Pierre Baud commanded the flight, accompanied by senior engineering vice president Bernard Ziegler and director of test Gérard Guyot. For three hours and twenty-three minutes, the sidesticks spoke to computers, and the computers spoke to the control surfaces, replacing the spiderweb of cables and pulleys that had governed aviation since its birth. The A320 was not merely a new airplane; it was a new philosophy. Flight envelope protection prevented the pilot from commanding the aircraft beyond its limits, a marriage of human judgment and electronic vigilance. The Prince and Princess of Wales had witnessed its rollout on Valentine's Day, but the romance was between Europe and innovation. Air France placed it into service on April 18, 1988, and the orders began to accumulate at a rate that would eventually surpass every rival but one. Today, an A320 family aircraft takes off or lands somewhere in the world every two seconds. Baud had called it "delightfully responsive and reassuringly stable." The digital age of flight had proven him right.