FEATURE
AI R BUSVS BOE I NG
by Guy Leitch
– TH E E N D O F TH E D UO P O LY? Three years ago Boeing was doing just fine. The long running market-defying airliner duopoly was healthy, with both sides scoring almost equally on orders won and planes delivered. Airline buyers for new planes knew that healthy competition kept both sides mostly honest. And then Boeing spectacularly crashed and burned. The duopoly may be over.
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AN BOEING BOUNCE BACK? – and if Airbus continues as the dominant supplier – will it abuse its position? Can the airlines expect a massive increase in airliner prices? Aviation Week hosted a fascinating webinar that covered these, any many other, questions about the changed relationship. What follows is my synthesis of the discussion.
Airbus does not need to win very many new orders
Post Covid-19 the balance of power has shifted massively in Airbus’s favour. The key metric is the backlog of planes still to be built and delivered. Airbus now has a huge lead over Boeing and the Americans have still not announced an answer to the A321neo, which has 14 FlightCom: April 2022
given Airbus a commanding lead in the narrowbody market that used to be split 50/50 between the 737 and A320. Demand is so strong that, despite the worldwide supply chains crisis, Airbus is talking about raising aircraft production to unprecedented levels. At the end of 2021, the Airbus claimed backlog was more than 7,000 aircraft while Boeing’s was 4,100. While there is debate about who overstates which backlog, if the Airbus backlog is calculated the same way as Boeing’s by excluding dubious orders, the Airbus backlog is still just over 6,000. This gives Airbus the ability to do one of two things: Either they can produce at a 50% faster rate than Boeing until both companies’ backlogs run
