The A3XX is the biggest new thing in air travel since 1969, when Boeing rolled out the 747 jumbo, three times larger than anything then flying. Founded the next year, Europe’s Airbus consortium has been fighting ever since to unseat Boeing as the world’s No. 1 airplane manufacturer, and to topple its 747 jumbo as the “Queen of the Skies.” The way Airbus and Boeing hate each other is legendary, and the A3XX brings the bitter rivalry to its climax. The A3XX would be the first of the superjumbo class, designed to fly faster, farther, cleaner and cheaper than the 416-seat 747. After spending $500 million on the design, Airbus is hyping it as a flying QE2 with space for 555 seats, plus luxuries never before seen at 35,000 feet, from luxury sleeper cabins to a casino, a business center and a massage room. “The whole idea is to redefine the limits of luxury and comfort in the air,” says John Leahy, the chief A3XX pitchman.
That’s if it flies. So far, the only concrete thing Jurgen and his team of 700 have to show off is “the beast” –an unfinished sheet-metal and plywood mock-up of the blimpish behemoth. But in the next two weeks, they expect a green light from the Airbus board to start promising the plane to airlines. The first A3XX could take wing as soon as 2005. “This is it, the final showdown between Airbus and Boeing,” says Lehman Brothers analyst Joseph Campbell, who predicts “all-out war.” “It’s going to be a great story. When people see the A3XX, they’re going to be amazed by the size of the thing. And once a major airline buys, it will be difficult for others not to follow.”
Not so long ago the superjumbo was a marvel in a different way. When Airbus introduced its original plan at an international air show in 1990, critics called it a “paper airplane” that never would fly, and never should. They said its sheer mass would crush runways, stir up gale-force winds and deafening noise on landing, and overwhelm airport terminals by disgorging “mobs” of nearly 600 people at a time. The U.S. 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. At the Air Travelers Association, president David Stempler calls the A3XX a “flying building” that will “darken the sky” and terrify airport neighbors when they first see it land.
Yet Airbus knew it could never be No. 1 if it did not challenge Boeing’s monopoly in the jumbo class. It plunged ahead in 1996, establishing a division to build the superjumbo. “People said we were crazy,” recalls A3XX marketing VP Philippe Jarry. “To us, too, the 747 was almost an untouchable –‘Flagship of every major airline, silhouette as familiar as the New York skyline.’ We thought everyone loved the Queen of the Skies.” Then, in focus-group sessions with frequent fliers and secret meetings with 747 customers, Airbus officials were surprised to hear a litany of complaints, like a noisy cockpit that offers a poor view of taxiways. “Suddenly, the queen was looking like a prince, and the prince a pauper,” says Jarry.
Airbus engineers went to work, designing the megajet to fly like a mini. They streamlined the A3XX to cut landing noise and winds to levels at or below those produced by the 747, which is 150 tons lighter. They invented a mighty vehicle called “the turtle” to show how 590 tons properly distributed over landing wheels will not crush runways. They mounted video cameras so pilots can see the runway under their nose. They’re still working on minor glitches, like the hair-raising evacuation chutes that made test volunteers feel like they were sliding from a height of seven stories, says Jarry. “Never in history have we designed an airplane in so much detail, down to the last millimeter, the last .1 percent,” says Jurgen.
Selling the superjumbo is a project nearly as ambitious. For the past year Airbus CEO Noel Forgeard and Leahy have been traveling the world, trying to steal Boeing’s best customers. Targeting the 21 major airlines that fly the latest 747s, Airbus is pitching the A3XX as a luxurious way to relieve the growing congestion at major hubs, like New York, Frankfurt and Tokyo, and particularly on long-haul flights to Asia. At least initially, major airlines have balked at the asking price of $210 million, $60 million more than the 747.
Airbus insists that superjumbo economies of scale will allow airlines to boost profits and cut ticket prices. The A3XX has two full cabins connected by wide stairways meant to evoke a cruise ship, and a third cabin running half the length of the windowless cargo deck down below. That’s where the pitchmen have envisioned putting everything from a video arcade to a gym, a sick bay, a nursery for the kids and a tennis court. “You might even have a McDonald’s franchise or a duty-free store down there,” says Leahy.
Airbus is hoping that the current rage for luxury in air travel will help launch the A3XX. And at a time when Americans seem to worship bigness, from cars to mansions, there is perhaps only one real surprise here. “It is interesting right now to see that Europeans are the ones thinking Texas-sized,” says Campbell. “If this were Boeing’s plane, European cartoonists would be having a field day with American folly.”
It would be easy enough. Sleeping berths and a sick bay will seem wise to anyone who has heard calls for a doctor on a grueling flight from North America to Asia. But the whole idea of a plane in which passengers have room to roam is iffy at best. “Some of this is just silly. McDonald’s? Last time I flew I got my meals for free,” says a Wall Street analyst. “I suspect you will see airlines use the space in many other ways –you may even see Saudi Air offering prayer rooms for Muslims. Who knows?” Frederic Battut, Paris agent for Degriflour, an online travel agency, says peanuts and magazines are all fine. “But if they offer you a place to make love, well, that’s something you’ll remember.”
Especially if the plane hits an air pocket. “What happens if there’s turbulence?” asks Stempler. “That’s why they ask you to wear your seat belt.” Giving 550 passengers access to one small gym raises obvious problems. “Airlines may briefly offer this stuff as a marketing gimmick to draw in customers,” predicts aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia. “Pretty soon, you’ll wind up with a plane segregated into three or four classes, including luxury sleeper berths above and a cattle class for 300 people packed in with the steerage below.”
Not so long ago, in an industry once infamous for macho, suicidal competition, Boeing would have answered the A3XX by building a bigger plane. But with its stock lagging the bull run of the 1990s, Boeing promised investors to be fiscally responsible. Bean counters came to rule over what one analyst calls “big boys with their toys,” ruling out big bets on a superjumbo. Yet Boeing executives don’t scoff at the “flying cruise ship.” They say such luxury could be had for less expense in a 500-seat “stretch” 747, which president Phil Condit offered airlines in a letter last week.
Meanwhile, Boeing has been doing all it can to stall the A3XX. After Airbus first hinted at the idea in 1990, Boeing invited the British, German, French and Spanish partners in the Airbus Industrie consortium to study the feasibility of a “Very Large Aircraft.” Boeing concluded there was no market, and Airbus executives went their own sometimes bitter way. With unveiled scorn, Jarry says Airbus partners were tickled to be “invited to the grand, the paramount discussion” by mighty Boeing, but Airbus Industrie suspected all along that the “study” was a ruse by Boeing to delay the A3XX. Boeing denies such chicanery. But author John Newhouse, who profiled the air-industry wars in “A Sporty Game,” says senior Boeing executives told him in 1993 that their aim was to “divide and conquer” their European competitors.
Seven years later this fight is bigger than the superjumbo. The A3XX is at the heart of the plan to create a unified European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., including Airbus as its commercial-jet division. Last week EADS codirector-to-be Philippe Camus said he’d like to see Airbus create an “integrated” company and launch the A3XX as a way to butter up the markets before the EADS stock offering, now scheduled for July. But there are doubters. “Here Airbus is supposed to become a real company, and they’re saying, ‘We’re going to spend all of our profits for the next five years on this huge albatross. Please buy our stock’,” says Aboulafia, who calls the A3XX “the purest expression of European technonationalism.”
The brawl is spilling out all over the place. Boeing officials appeared before Parliament in London this December, and at the Singapore air show in March, warning that there is no market for a superjumbo. They foresee a demand for fewer than 400 planes with more than 400 seats in the next 20 years –not enough to justify the $12 billion development cost of the A3XX, but plenty to sustain an updated 747. Airbus, which forecasts 20-year superjumbo demand at more than 1,500 planes, resents the implication that it is launching a ruinous trade war. “Boeing is desperate to stop us, and I think they’re doing some very silly things. I mean, going to Parliament?” says Leahy. “I don’t think they’re fooling anybody, running around saying the world doesn’t need a competitor to the 747. You have to come from Seattle to say this with a straight face.”
In fact, the superjumbo war has become too political to call. The market forecasts have become so transparently self-serving that few Wall Street analysts take either Boeing or Airbus at its word. Airbus hopes that if it can land elite carriers, others will hop on the bandwagon. So far Airbus claims that four or five airlines have signed letters of intent, and this month Singapore Airlines confirmed that it is willing to buy. That’s a critical turning point in a secretive, cutthroat industry. “These are the most sophisticated games players in the world. There are levels upon levels of deception here,” says a top Wall Street analyst. “No one tips their hand early.”
There is another telling indicator: with the number of air passengers rising 5 percent per year, major airports are anticipating the “flying cruise ship.” In Asia alone, new terminals built or in the works in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and even Inchon, South Korea, are all ready to handle a megajumbo. Hong Kong’s new Chek Lap Kok Airport has extra-high terminal floors to unload passengers from the A3XX’s upper deck, three stories up, and slots big enough to park an even wider and longer plane. John Pashen, general manager of airport planning for the Airport Authority of Hong Kong, calls the eventual arrival of a superjumbo “inevitable.”
Airbus is geared up to launch this year, and headquarters in Toulouse is swept up in the excitement of the race. Executives recall the 1969 launch of the 747 and the Apollo moon shot in one breath, as signs of what then seemed like an unshakable American dominance in aerospace. “What Boeing did with the 747 was an incredible feat at the time. Bill Allen was the man!” says Jurgen, paying homage to the father of the jumbo. In fact, Jurgen has ordered his PR team to stop claiming that the A3XX represents a historic advance in airplane design equal to the 747, and that boast has disappeared from company briefings. “But now, Queen of the Skies? By 2005, only the Queen of England will be older.” And perhaps there will be a new European king.
