Boeing, Airbus rivalry gathers steam

For the past 20 years, the skies have seen huge jet airliners from only two companies; Boeing and Airbus. It is unlikely any other competition will take off to challenge these two anytime soon, writes WOLE SHADARE
 
Fierce battle
It is a rivalry that dates back to many years and it seems to be becoming fiercer, as Boeing and Airbus, two biggest aircraft makers are at each other’s throat in a bid to gain market share. For the meantime, their intense rivalry can almost be likened to two dogfighting planes, each one just waiting for the right opportunity to shoot the other down and gain dominance of the skies.
 
Antecedents
Airbus started out as Airbus Industries in 1970. However, the company, as it is known today, was formed in 1999 out of a consortium of aerospace manufacturers, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company and the British BAE Systems. The stock-sharing scheme was then EADS with 80 per cent and BAE with 20 per cent. It was not until October 2006 that BAE sold its shareholding to EADS.
The company currently employs around 63,000 people working in 16 sites in Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain and France. They have final assembly production plants in Toulouse, France; Hamburg, Germany; and Seville, Spain. Since 2009 they have also had a plant in Tianjin, China and now also have subsidiaries in Japan, India and the United States. Airbus has the first commercially viable fly-bywire airliner, the Airbus A320 and currently the world’s largest passenger airliner, the A380.
Airbus
Boeing goes back a long way to 1910 when the company was first established by William Boeing to build wooden-frame airplanes. They made planes for the US during WWI and then went on to make metal planes in the 1930’s and 1940’s. By the 1950’s Boeing developed jet engine aircraft. In the 1960’s, Boeing came out with the twin-engine 737,what would later become the forerunner to their most famous plane.
It survived hard times in the 1970’s before finally coming out with the Boeing 747, then the plane with the largest seating capacity in the world. Through the 1980’s until the present, Boeing has since seen its stock rise; it has even ventured into other fields like defense and the space program. Boeing currently hires around 172,000 employees. All its plants are in the U.S. in places including Alabama, Arizona, California, Kansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Washington.
Their most successful planes are currently the Boeing 747-8 and the Boeing 777F. With Boeing already at a head start in the passenger airline industry, Airbus had to offer airlines something better. It eventually came up with fly-by-wire technology, where the manual flight controls of a plane are replaced with an electronic interface.
This technology enabled the addition of a computer that could automatically adjust to stabilize the aircraft even without input from the pilot. Airbus was also the first to use composite materials in their planes, making them lighter, although Boeing would later up the ante, using composite materials for 50 per cent of its 787 Dreamliner. Airbus is now working on fitting composite materials in at least 53 per cent of its planes.
 
Airbus A380 vs. the Boeing 747
The two rival planes are not so dissimilar when it comes to dimensions. The A380 is 8.4 meters high and 7.15 meters wide while the 747 is 7.81 meters high and 6.5 meters wide. Each company claims the better plane. Airbus says the A380 consumes eight per cent less fuel per passenger compared to the 747 and needs 17 per cent less runway for takeoff and landing.
The A380 is also touted to have a cabin floor space of 478 square meters, almost half more than the 747-8. However, Boeing claims the 747-8 is over 10 per cent lighter per seat and saves 11 per cent in fuel consumption per passenger. They also said their plane has a trip-cost reduction of 21 per cent and a seat-mile cost reduction of more than six per cent. Their customers got in on the act, Singapore Airlines CEO Chew Choong Seng sided with the A380, saying it was performing better than the airline had anticipated, consuming 20 per cent less fuel per passenger than the 747-400’s in their fleet.
However, Time Clark of Emirates said the A380 is more fuel economic at Mach 0.86 than at 0.83. Observers have also noted that the A380 is 50 per cent quieter than a 747-400 on takeoff. The two rival planes are not so dissimilar when it comes to dimensions. The A380 is 8.4 meters high and 7.15 meters wide, while the 747 is 7.81 meters high and 6.5 meters wide.
 
The Airbus A350XWB vs Boeing 787
The game changer between the two is in the way the fuselage is manufactured. As the A350 & the 787 are both constructed with CFRP, Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic, the methodology between the two is HUGE. While the A350 is relegated to using the decades old process of “patching” together “panels” to produce the fuselage…Boeing being Boeing went for broke by producing a series of solid, one piece BARRELS…and, of course patenting the process.
The only “seams” on the 787 fuselage are the circular “joins” of the barrels. The 787 fuselage arrives at the Everett final assembly buildings 40-26 & 40-36 in five sections from global suppliers. Two smaller joins complete the forward and aft sections. Now the air frame is completed in the Final Body Join (FBJ) area, where the forward and aft sections are both connected to the huge center wing box.
The Airbus A330 versus Boeing B777
In contrast to recent widespread media reports over the A350-900 stealing a march on the 777-200ER, which has seen sluggish sales in recent years and Airbus’ latest advertisement that declared the Cash Operating Cost (COC) per seat of an A330 is “up to 15 per cent lower than the 777-200ER”, Chicago-based airframer Boeing refutes that Airbus’ claim is anything but misconstrued and “is not backed up by actual data”, according to a Boeing document obtained by Aspire Aviation.
Specifically, Boeing reiterated that the B777 remains as the “established market leader of the 300 to 400 seat market” and said there is a 1 per cent improvement to the B777-200ER’s fuel burn through an existing Performance Improvement Package (PIP).
 
Showing their might at Farnborough
At Farnborough in July 2016, Airbus announced that in a “prudent, proactive step,” starting in 2018 it expects to deliver 12 A380 aircraft per year, down from 27 deliveries in 2015. The firm also warned production might slip back into red ink on each aircraft produced at that time, though it anticipates production will remain in the black for 2016 and 2017.
The firm expects that healthy demand for its other aircraft would allow it to avoid job losses from the cuts. Boeing’s newest aircraft, the 737 Max, was on display to the public for the first time this week at the Farnborough Airshow as the United States aerospace giant approaches its hundredth birthday, with orders remaining strong. The 737 family is Boeing’s most successful aircraft range and the latest Max model – which is due to be delivered in 2017 with launch customer Southwest Airlines – was borne out the desire for airlines to have more fuel efficient planes.
Vice President and General Manager of Boeing’s 737 Max project, Keith Leverkuhn, told CNBC in an interview earlier last week that it goes back to when they launched the programme. “ So, we set about to try and create an iteration that brought in all the available technologies that would allow us to improve the fuel efficiency as well as the emissions and the noise.” So far, the Boeing 737 Max has racked up a total of 3,256 orders. Its rival jet, the Airbus A320neo has around 4,700 orders. Both jets are single-aisle aircraft, the highest-selling segment of planes.
 
Conclusion
Some of the world’s biggest airlines prefer a mix of the two, although they might have more of one brand than the other. As to what models are still in the air, according to the 2013 World Airline Census, for Boeing there are still 148 717’s flying; 109 727’s; 5,438 737’s; 627 747’s; 855 757’s; 821 767’s; 1,094 777’s; and 84 787’s. For Airbus, it was 234 A300’s; 84 A310’s; 5,170 A320’s; 927 A330’s and 106 A380’s.
Wole Shadare