At Airbus these days, the sky is indeed the limit. In the past three decades, Airbus, a consortium of European companies, has emerged as the only major rival to Boeing, and it is now gearing up to spend about $12 billion in development costs to build a plane that will replace the 747 as the “Queen of the Skies.’’ To Airbus executives, it’s an easy bet. After all, global passenger traffic is widely projected to double in the next 15 years as more people board planes to do business in an increasingly globalized economy. To move more passengers between big international airports that have a limited number of time slots for takeoffs and landings, a plane that holds more than 550 people is compelling. And when it comes to planes, bigger is better–studies have shown time and again that travelers like spaciousness (and with a wider fuselage, Airbus says that seats in the A3XX will be an inch wider than the 747s). Says Joseph Campbell, a Lehman Brothers analyst: “Once a major airline buys, it will be difficult for others not to follow.”
Airbus is now just weeks away from committing to build the plane, with an eye to rolling the first superjumbo off the assembly line in late 2005. With a green light from the planemaker’s executive board, Airbus salespeople will scramble to get enough orders to guarantee a successful launch. Singapore Airlines and Emirates Airline have said they want the plane, and Airbus says four other carriers have signaled their interest. U.S. airlines have said they don’t want the plane at present, but that could change if it catches on overseas. Selling these jets takes time–after all, the list price is $210 million.
The cost of the plane isn’t the only eyepopper. The A3XX –which will likely be dubbed the A350 if Airbus’s pattern holds–is big enough to fill up most of a football field, and will tip the scales at more than 1 million pounds. With a wide staircase connecting the two decks, you could almost get lost inside. Airbus says that with its high-tech construction, the A3XX will fly faster, farther and more cheaply than the smaller 747.
A decade ago, when Airbus introduced its idea for the jet at an international air show, it was dismissed as a “paper airplane” that never would fly, and never should. Critics said its sheer bulk would damage runways, stir up gale-force winds with deafening noise and overwhelm airport terminals by disgorging “mobs” of 600 people. As recently as 1998 the Federal Aviation Administration questioned whether the public could accept a fatal crash involving a double-decker superjumbo, which could carry more than 900 people in a mass economy class.
Yet Airbus believed it had to mount a challenge in the jumbo class, or forever yield this profitable slice of the market to Boeing. In 1996 it established a division to build the superjumbo. “People said we were crazy,” recalls A3XX marketing director Philippe Jarre. “We, too, saw the 747 as almost untouchable, flagship of every major airline, silhouette as familiar as the New York skyline.’’ In focus-group sessions with 1,200 frequent fliers and secret meetings with 747 customers, however, Airbus officials were surprised to hear a litany of complaints. Among the gripes: the cockpits were noisy and provided poor visibility of runways while the plane was taxiing. Tucked away in the nose of the plane is a famously intimate first-class section that proved to be too small.
Encouraged, Airbus engineers went to work. They streamlined the A3XX to cut landing noise and winds to levels at or below those produced by the 747. They invented a vehicle called “the turtle” to prove that 600 tons properly distributed over a sufficient number of landing wheels will not crush runways.
Will the plane crush the 747? Predictably, Boeing doesn’t think so. “We’re quite confident our customers don’t want the A3XX,’’ says John Roundhill, Boeing’s vice president for product strategy and development. It sees demand for fewer than 400 superjumbo planes over the next two decades (Airbus sees demand for more than 1,200 large planes over the next 20 years). Boeing’s bearish view stems from its belief that the dominant aviation trend will be more direct flights, bypassing huge international hub airports, on smaller aircraft. Whatever demand there is for large planes, Boeing hopes to fill it with a stretched version of the 747.
For passengers, this sky-high clash of titans is guaranteed to provide lots of in-flight entertainment in coming years. “This is it, the final showdown between Airbus and Boeing,” says Lehman Brothers’ Campbell. In the meantime, better sharpen those tennis skills. After all, it’s hard to predict how a ball will bounce at 35,000 feet.
