I have never particularly liked Airbus. For decades, a political football parading as a real company, they were always just a tad too aggressive and self-important for my liking. Some of our airline colleagues related just how different it was to accept new aircraft in Seattle and in Toulouse. The Airbus personnel always acted like they were some kind of superior beings with the customers lost sheep needing direction. The initial debacle with the proposed A350 was a good example of what happens when a company thinks they know everything better and try to rape their customers with their ideas.
When they created the A380, there was a brief period when they were in the limelight, after all, that fat lady is huge, the biggest there is. But other than that, it is not a revolutionary aircraft in any way.
When Boeing, very wisely, decided to forego creating a similar behemoth and went instead for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, they also made a number of design decisions that did result in a trendsetting product. With the fuselage constructed of composite barrels and most of the hydraulics replaced by electrics, the 787 is like a beacon showing where the future is. Whatever Airbus does to the A350, it will be second fiddle, no doubt about that.
Of course the next big battle will be the replacements for the 737 and 320 family aircraft. Both manufacturers have decided to offer re-engined versions of their current bestsellers, resulting in the Boeing 737MAX and the Airbus A320NEO. Both are interim solutions with a shelf life of less than a decade, serving as the mainstay of the industry until engine and aerodynamic innovation matures enough to warrant the expense of completely new designs. But with fuel prices heading North, airlines are eager to get their hand on aircraft offering fuels savings and the MAX and NEO will both deliver that.
They are selling well and it is therefore difficult to understand why Airbus has felt it necessary to run a series of double page ads trying to throw mud on the 737MAX. Unless they are truly afraid that the MAX will put the NEO to shame…
Some of the claims in the ads are nothing if not preposterous. Saying that the 737 does not have a wide-aisle option needed for to-day’s fast turn-around times is joke if we consider that the two largest and most successful low-fare airlines, Southwest and Ryanair, are both 737 operators and in fact became huge on the back of this venerable aircraft type.
Saying that the 737 has little engine optimization options due to the undercarriage design also misses the point since this issue has been solved quite brilliantly, so what is the problem?
As to the comfort of the passenger cabin (also a point of mud throwing by the folks in TLS), well, 320 cabins may be wider but when it is crammed with seats as the Airbuses of, for instance, Vueling are, the legroom is horrible while the seat-width is not any better than in a 737.
Reading the part of the ad raving about the A320NEO, it becomes evident how easy it is to make claims of being better than a competitor’s product while the actual truth is being dusted over… I think the fact that somebody has replaced the control column with a joystick is not necessarily reason enough to think that they own the world.
The most laughable part of the 320 ode is the reference to the sharklets… winglets to the rest of the world. Suffering from an acute case of not-invented-here, Airbus had for years refused to think about fitting winglets on the 320 family, causing millions to be spent by their customers quite unnecessarily… Add to this the fact that the sharklets are not even truly Airbus’ own design (all claims to the contrary) and one cannot but question: what is this dirty advertising campaign trying to achieve? Who is it aimed for?
No airline or expert will be misled by this simplistic, mostly irrelevant comparison and decisions will not be made on the basis of the sharklets.
Do they expect passengers to refuse to fly in 737s once the NEO is there? If I were an Airbus shareholder, I would seriously question management in Toulouse about the money being wasted on something so colossally misguided as this.