How do you think Airbus learned how to make airplanes???
Well let's see, the first ever passenger carrying flight was in Britain, closely followed by one in France.
Then during the war the Brits and Germans developed a fair talent for building heavy bombers.
After the war Aerospatiale was developing turbo-prop airliners, and a British company called de-Havilland developed the worlds first jet airliner, which was called the Comet - this went into service somewhat before the B707. A bit later, Vickers built the VC-10 which still crosses the Atlantic faster than anything Boeing have ever built.
Then in the 1960s we thought it would be rather fun to develop something called Concorde, this taught the Europeans a lot about high-tech alloys, and how to develop large airliners as part of a multi-lingual multi-national team.
Then out of all that came Airbus !
How did the Americans learn how to make jet engines?
G
Who has never understood quite why the Americans, who invented the aeroplane and done more with it than anybody else, can't accept that anybody else might occasionally have done something with it on their own.