ABSTRACT
Foes: Boeing and Airbus On October 24, 2003, the last commercial Concorde flight, British Airways flight 002 from New York-JFK, touched down at London-Heathrow (Parris 2003), evoking melancholic commentary from aviation enthusiasts who had seen it as a symbol of technological progress. Few are likely to notice or lament when other once great jetliners make their last flight in the next decade or so. In 2008, for instance, there were only five Lockheed L-1011s still flying, making it perhaps the most endangered airliner. Inevitably, Lockheed will join the ranks of de Havilland, Dassault, Vickers, and Convair as permanently grounded plane-makers. The last planes built by Douglas, Fokker, and Yakovlev will follow in a decade or two. Their demise will leave the skies still more firmly in the grasp of Boeing and Airbus. And so the title of this chapter refers to the fact that, more than ever before, it is these two plane-makers who shape the scope and speed of the airborne world. Boeing and Airbus together accounted for 68 percent of the world jetliner fleet (Table 4.1) and a commanding 87 percent of the order backlog in 2008 (Air Transport World 2008c). Furthermore, because these two companies manufacture almost all new aircraft sold today with more than 100 seats, termed large civil aircraft (LCA) in the language of the industry, their share of actual air traffic is even higher than these figures indicate. This chapter tells the story of Boeing and Airbus – their families of airliners, their complex relationships with the national governments in their home countries, their partnerships with manufacturers of engines and other major aircraft components, and their competition – primarily with each other, but also with regional jet (RJ) manufacturers, and perhaps with new players based in China or some other part of the world. Boeing and Airbus have very different origins but are rather similar today in many respects. Boeing first came to prominence as an airmail carrier, manufactured some innovative and important land planes and flying boats before World War II, and then defined and dominated the Jet Age. Airbus only got its start in the 1960s and introduced the world to the wide-body twinjet. Boeing has been a privately owned company throughout its history – although it has benefited from government largesse – while Airbus began as a consortium of governmentbacked and government-owned national aerospace champions.
