AT A glitzy party in Toulouse on July 10th Airbus, Europe’s aerospace giant, revealed its “newest” plane. But many aviation buffs might find it familiar. It was a repainted C-Series aircraft—originally developed by Bombardier of Canada—a project in which Airbus bought a 50.01% stake on July 1st. Airbus welcomed the aircraft into its family of planes by renaming the CS-100 as the A220-100 and the CS-300 as the A220-300. The message was clear: it is now an Airbus plane. But with Airbus and Bombardier’s arch rivals, Boeing of America and Embraer of Brazil, announcing their own joint venture last week, the skies are running out of competition.

The tie-up between Airbus and Bombardier, originally signed last October, initially came as good news for many airlines. Before Airbus swooped, the C-Series project was financially on its knees following an attempt by Boeing, Airbus’s arch-rival, to get tariffs slapped on imports of the planes into America. That would have decimated its order book and pushed Bombardier to the brink of bankruptcy. By allowing the C-Series aircraft ordered by airlines in America to be built at its Alabama factory, Airbus stopped Boeing from killing the programme off before it got off the ground. Only 38 of the jets are yet in service but Eric Schulz, Airbus’s chief salesman, has grand plans. He now hopes to sell 6,100 of the jets over the next twenty years—a figure derided by veteran aerospace journalists as “wildly optimistic”.

Even so, Boeing has sniffed a threat to the short-haul family of planes it makes called the 737. And so it responded to the Airbus-Bombardier coupling last week by announcing its own: a joint venture with Embraer of Brazil, a maker of smaller civil jets that makes aircraft with between 100-150 seats in competition with Bombardier. 

But with Bombardier now firmly in Airbus’s camp, and Embraer lined up with Boeing, the two giants now almost rule the entire sky, at least as far as large civil aircraft are concerned. Other new aircraft projects around the world have flown into turbulence and are not serious competition. Long-standing worries about air safety in Russia have meant that the Sukhoi Superjet 100, a small airliner made in that country, has sold to relatively few Western airlines. China has tried to enter the market for airliners with the ARJ-21, a regional jet, and the C919, an aircraft that looks remarkably similar to Airbus’s short-haul aircraft. But apart from a few sales to some local carriers subject to some patriotic arm-twisting from Beijing, there have hardly been any sales as they are not as fuel efficient as Airbus and Boeing’s latest planes. Mitsubishi, a Japanese engineering giant, is also building a new regional jet, but the programme is running very late and is much smaller than anything Airbus or Boeing produces.

So will passengers be doomed to fly either Airbus or Boeing’s planes forever more? Hold your horses: Boeing’s tie-up with Embraer is not a done deal yet. Many investors in the Brazilian planemaker are unhappy that they will only get 20% of the joint-venture with Boeing if it goes through. The front-runner in a presidential election due in October has promised to veto the deal on national-security grounds. Mr Schulz himself is sceptical that Boeing’s 737 airliner fits together with Embraer’s E2 jets as well as Bombardier’s C-Series does with Airbus’s A320 family of aircraft. For instance, the C-Series and the A320 uses similar engines; the E2 and the 737 do not. As one executive at Embraer told Gulliver at last November’s Dubai Air Show, “a tie-up would do much for Boeing—but little for us or ordinary passengers”.

Source: economist
Airbus and Boeing are tightening their hold on the sky