Airbus: the bad news continues.

American Thinker ^ | 7 March 2007 | Thomas Lifson

[Paul Ross]

The good new for Airbus is that they don't actually have to sell airplanes to stay in business

Bump! Proverbial nail on the head.

[magellan]

Replace a four-engine airplane with a two-engine airplane yields instant savings. That is a no brainer. But there is more to it than just that.

The difference between the A340's first flight and the 777's first flight was just 32 months. It was only 19 months from the first twin-engine A330 flight to the 777's first flight. From an engineering and technical perspective, the two designs are comparable.

Despite this, Airbus was not able to move Air Canada over to its twin-engined A330.

The fact is Boeing didn't out-engineer Airbus, they out innovated, and out bet Airbus. Boeing bet on big twin ETOPS, and then made big twin ETOPS happen by force of will. Boeing created its own destiny, like Boeing has done time and time again. It is the perfect comparison of a pioneering northwest U.S. philosophy as old as Lewis and Clark compared to a Eurosocialist philosophy.

Why Airbus was not more aggressive building a larger, longer-ranged, ETOPS A330 from the get-go is beyond me. There were A310-300s and 767-200ERs and 767-300ERs flying all over the north Atlantic from the mid-1980s. Airbus ignored its own market data. 180 minute ETOPS was on the horizon when the designs for the A330 and A340 were being put to paper.

Airbus chose its destiny. The original A350 design, a warmed over A330, should have been built 10 years ago. The original A340-200 and A340-300 should never have been built. These early A340s will be headed to cargo conversions very soon. Loyal Airbus customers will replace them with A330s, the rest will buy 777s. I don't think customers will even wait for the 787 and certainly not the A350.

Even new production passenger Boeing 767-300ERs are being ordered by customers where the 777-200ER is too big, and the 787 is too far in the future.

The proverbial wheels have come off Airbus' landing gear. As a result the best they can hope for is a crash landing. Of course, a crash landing is exactly what Power8 is.