Battle for the skies

Aero giants Airbus and Boeing fought again for sales – and media attention – at this year’s Paris air show. Murdo Morrison, editor of Flight International, reports.

Like the Roman mob, there is nothing the media at the Paris air show enjoys more than an epic gladitorial contest, with a victor and a loser, bloodied in defeat. Europe’s Airbus certainly enjoys the role of triumphant combatant at the biggest biennial gathering of the global aerospace industry – the 50th edition was held over five days at the Le Bourget airfield near Paris in mid-June. In front of a home crowd, Airbus never misses an opportunity to upstage rival Boeing, gleefully updating its orders tally daily and using the event to debut its latest products.

This year was no exception, with a flypast on the final day of the show of Airbus’s newest airliner, the A350, a week after the widebody’s maiden flight in Toulouse. There was even an emperor – in the form of President Hollande – in attendance to give it the thumbs up. The A350 – which will undergo a 2500h flight test programme ahead of planned entry into service next year – is Airbus’s belated answer to the all-composite Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the first 50 examples of which spent most of this year grounded following incidents with in-flight battery fires.

Boeing, by contrast, always grumpily denies that there is an ‘orders race’. Customers may or may not choose to make public new airliner commitments during the week, it insists. It does not time its own announcements with Paris or any other show. However, the US manufacturer does seem to be slowly recognising the publicity potential of playing the media’s game. After boycotting flying displays for years, at last year’s Farnborough in July, it flew its 787 for the first time at an air show. The Dreamliner was again on display at Paris – in Qatar Airways colours – though not flying.

This year, Boeing made the headlines again when Michael O’Leary, outspoken chief executive of Ryanair – Europe’s biggest low-cost airline and one of the US manufacturer’s best customers – broke a self-imposed ban on attending air shows (a hard-nosed businessman, he says they are full of ‘aerosexuals’). He turned up to ink a $3 billion order (at list prices) for 175 Boeing 737-800s. He also revealed that the Irish carrier was evaluating an order for at least 200 of the re-engined Max version of the 737, which it could announce by year-end.

O’Leary is among the toughest negotiators in the business and, although Boeing will not be maxing profits from any deal with Ryanair, its business will be welcome: Ryanair, an all-737 operator, had flirted with Airbus’s rival A320neo and China’s under-development Comac C919. O’Leary admitted that one of the reasons he did not choose the A320neo (for new engine option) was the likely delay in receiving aircraft. The re-engined Airbus narrowbody – which will go into service in 2015, two years ahead of the Max – has been a victim of its success, he said.

Sukhoi Su-35 Bombardier CSeries

Although Boeing announced an accelerated production schedule for its re-engined narrowbody at Paris, the 737 Max registered only one firm order – for 30 aircraft. It leaves Boeing’s new offering in the crucial short-haul segment trailing the A320neo by 800 orders, despite being launched just nine months later than its rival. At the time, Boeing opted to follow Airbus with a re-engined version of its topselling narrowbody rather than – as many had predicted – gambling on an all-new design, which would have been much more expensive and taken longer to reach market.

After a tortuous entry into service with the 787 – initially delayed by two years and then grounded for several months this year by its battery problems – Boeing did have better news on its Dreamliner, announcing at Paris the latest and largest variant, the 787-10, with 102 firm orders from five customers. It gives Boeing a family of three Dreamliners, straddling the 250- to 330-seat market. The 787 sits below the larger twin-engine 777, at 350- to 400-seats, a revamped version of which – the 777X family – Boeing is now working on.

With the latest variant of Boeing’s venerable jumbo jet, the 747-800, struggling, Airbus has the opportunity to own the ultra-large segment with its 550-seat A380. Since the glory days of the 747 in the 1970s and 1980s, Boeing has been sceptical of the potential of this market and sales of the A380, almost six years after its entry into service, would appear to prove it right. Despite flying the aircraft in the colours of its latest customer, British Airways, and an order at Paris for 20 aircraft – the first for six months – Airbus is still 18 short of 300 orders, seen as the breakeven for the programme.

As expected, Airbus had a good Paris in terms of new business, notching up firm orders for 241 aircraft, out of a total of 630 orders, commitments and options, according to Flightglobal figures. This included 170 A320-family twinjets and 71 long-haul airliners, including a commitment for 10 A3501000s from United Airlines. Thanks mainly to orders for the 787-10 and confirmation of Ryanair’s 737 deal, Boeing’s tally was more than respectable, securing commitments for 342 airliners during the show.

Regional jets

Airbus versus Boeing was not the only headto-head contest going on at Paris. Brazil’s Embraer and Canada’s Bombardier have long fought it out in the market for sub-100seat regional jets, enjoying a duopoly since the exit of makers such as BAE Systems, Fairchild Dornier, Fokker and Saab more than a decade ago. Paris certainly belonged to Embraer. It notched up 365 orders for the second generation of its best-selling E-Jet family, single-aisle airliners of between 80 and 118 seats that compete just below the narrowbodies of Airbus and Boeing, which it formally launched at the show.

Like Airbus and Boeing, Embraer has opted to re-engine its existing range to provide better fuel economy, rather than undergo a fundamental re-engineering of the airframe. It has also ruled out a higher-capacity aircraft to take it into full competition with the Americans and Europeans. Bombardier, by contrast, decided last decade to come up with a clean-sheet design for a larger five-abreast narrowbody to complement its CRJ family of regional jets.

The result, the CSeries, is a 100-seat-plus aircraft that competes both with Embraer’s largest offerings and entry-level variants from Airbus and Boeing. The CSeries was not at Paris – Bombardier was expected to fly the initial CS100 variant for the first time at the end of June, with the aircraft due to enter service in 2014. The Canadian airframer is putting a brave face on its just 391 orders accumulated over several years and insists that the fact that the CSeries is the only all-new aircraft on the market to offer a step-change in fuel efficiency.

Several other manufacturers are battling to enter the regional market, which demand for short-haul feeder services in emerging regions has re-ignited. They include Japan’s Mitsubishi, China’s Comac and Russia’s Sukhoi. Of them all, only Sukhoi was making any noise in Paris. Its Superjet is a collaboration between the Russian design bureau – known mostly for its Cold War fighter aircraft – and Italy’s Finmeccanica, with a subsidiary of the latter responsible for sales in the ‘Western hemisphere’. Sukhoi has already made a modest number of deliveries in Russia and South East Asia.

That subsidiary, Superjet International, had on display the first Superjet to be handed over to a western customer – a Mexican airline. But strains are beginning to show in what is the first real collaboration between the Russians and European industry on a commercial aircraft, with Finmeccanica’s chief executive complaining at Paris of a difficult and suspi-

cious relationship between the Russian and Italian company, which has provided Sukhoi with engineering as well as marketing and branding expertise.

That was not the only spat between Finmeccanica and a foreign partner. The Italians jointly own ATR, a maker of 70-seat turboprops, with EADS, Franco-German parent of Airbus. Finmeccanica subsidiary Alenia is keen to press ahead with a 90-seat stretch of the aircraft, but EADS is sceptical about the return on what would be a hefty investment. Alenia has threatened to go it alone, or team with another manufacturer, if a launch decision is delayed much longer. How practical this would be when both partners jointly own the design rights to the current ATR models is unclear.

Military aircraft

With the US military and its contractors absent because of bugetary sequestration, it was left to the Europeans and the Russians to dominate the air displays with arrays of military hardware. Probably the most impressive participant was the Sukhoi Su-35, the latest thrust-vectoring version of the Cold War fighter known as the Flanker. The aircraft has been designed primarily for the Russian military, but Moscow is keen to promote it on export markets, along with other products from a newly-confident, restructured Russian industry.

One of the Su-35’s main competitors, the Dassault Rafale, was also performing in the displays, with Canada emerging as a possible second export customer. Dassault has also teamed with Alenia and EADS to develop a new unmanned air vehicle for European governments. The new chief executive of the family-owned Dassault Aviation, Eric Trappier, used Paris to criticise the ‘buy American policy at any cost’ among some European nations. Several, including the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, are acquiring the US-designed Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

The absence of US rivals also gave Airbus’s Military division a chance to put in the spotlight its A400M airlifter, due to go into service with launch customer France within weeks. Ironically, given the dire straits of most European budgets, the defence market remains dynamic, at least at the valuefor-money end. Several firms are spotting opportunities for adapting existing aircraft into low-cost platforms for surveillance equipment, allowing governments and agencies to avoid paying over the odds to a traditional defence contractor such as BAE Systems, Raytheon or Northrop Grumman.

Among them are Austrian manufacturer of piston training and leisure aircraft Diamond and Italy’s Piaggio Aero, maker of a stylish but sluggishly-selling turboprop executive aircraft. The latter has turned its unmistakeable twin-pusher Avanti II into a remotely-piloted spyplane, which, packed with sensors, can take high-definition pictures of activity on the ground from an altitude of 45,000ft and stay in the sky for 16h. The so-called HammerHead will fly for the first time later this year with Piaggio hoping for a launch deal from its home customer, cash-strapped Rome. n

Airbus A400M