Airlines recovering after Sept 11 - Airbus
European planemaker Airbus today said the world’s airlines were recovering from the September 11 crisis.
Neither Airbus nor its US rival Boeing seemed to have major new business to announce this week at the Asian Aerospace 2002 show in Singapore, where industry executives are cautiously predicting a rebound but unsure when it might happen.
But in a fresh war of words against Boeing, Airbus took a swipe at Boeing’s plans for a quiet new version of the 747 jumbo jet, saying so far the only silence came from potential customers.
Airbus said the Airbus 500-plus-seat super jumbo, the A380, remained on schedule to enter service in 2006 while Boeing still needed to find somebody to buy its new 747 model, unveiled yesterday.
Boeing says the 400-seat 747-400XQLR will be quiet enough to meet European noise standards while having a longer range that will make some new trans-Pacific routes possible.
‘‘What is particularly quiet with this new airplane is the new orders, because we are not aware of any launch customers,’’ Airbus president Noel Forgeard said.
Forgeard said Airbus was succeeding in gaining more than half of the world’s new plane orders and despite the industry-wide slowdown that was severely aggravated by the terror attacks in America it still expected to deliver 300 aircraft this year.
A top Boeing executive, Larry Dickenson, said earlier that Boeing would rather look at plane deliveries than orders, and it planned to deliver 380 planes this year - about 100 fewer than it had predicted before the terror attacks.
‘‘Announcements of orders is a game that’s been played in this industry,’’ said Dickenson, the senior vice president of sales at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. ‘‘As we’ve found out, orders aren’t significant - it’s deliveries.’’
Airlines laid off thousands of workers and slashed routes after September 11 and many are losing millions, but Airbus said traffic was picking up and the industry seemed ready to recover, just as it did after the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990 caused a spike in fuel prices and scared away travellers.
‘‘We’re seeing a definite recovery in the market,’’ said the chief commercial officer at Airbus, John Leahy.
‘‘We forecast this rebound to be similar to the events of the early 1990s, the Gulf War scenario. Traffic dropped off and then came back. We’re starting to see that same thing right now.’’
The Asian aviation market has proven more resilient than others in the current crisis, and Airbus says it will launch a major effort to sell more jets in Japan, where airlines have been loyal Boeing customers and Airbus holds less than 20% of the business.
‘‘Japan - we have to recognise it is a stronghold of our competitor,’’ Leahy said. ‘‘It will not be an easy fight.’’
