Airbus Clings To Plans Consortium Unswayed By Boeing’s Decision Not To Build Huge Jet

Despite Boeing’s plans to shelve development of a superjumbo jet, rival Airbus Industrie said Tuesday it is proceeding on schedule and should be ready to launch the mammoth plane next year.

On Monday, Boeing Co. said it was mothballing plans to develop the larger and longer-range versions of its workhorse 747-400 jumbo jet because it didn’t have enough orders to justify the $7 billion project.

David Venz, a spokesman for Airbus in Herndon, Va., said even though Boeing didn’t see a market for 500-seat planes, Airbus was continuing to develop its own superjumbo, called the A3XX.

The airplane should be launched in 1998 and enter service in 2003, he said.

“It doesn’t slow us down a bit,” he said.

Rather than revamp an existing model, Airbus is designing the new plane from scratch. Its largest plane to date, the A340, seats 300 to 400 people and has a maximum range of about 8,000 miles.

The Boeing 747-400 in use today has a capacity of about 420 passengers and an 8,200-mile range. The proposed Boeing 747-500X would have seated 490 people and carried them up to 10,200 miles, while the proposed 747-600X would have carried 500 to 550 passengers about 8,500 miles.

The $8 billion A3XX project calls for the first version to seat 550 people, with the potential for future versions to seat up to 800 passengers. Its range would run up to 8,500 miles, Venz said. The plane will have three levels, two dedicated to passengers, with the lower deck either carrying cargo or additional people, he said.

Ron Woodard, president of the commercial airplane group at the Seattle-based Boeing, said the company will continue studying the larger planes. “When the market develops for such an airplane, we will be ready,” he said.

He said that realistically, only about 10 airlines in the world would order the larger 747s to fly long inter-continental routes.

“Though we’re really happy with the way the airplane is coming together, given the amount of money you have to invest to develop it, we’re having a hard time understanding why it makes a good business case,” said Mike Bair, spokesman for the Boeing Commercial Airplane Group.

Bair said it will be at least two to five years before the market develops, and even then, the company expects that no more than 450 of the superjumbos to be ordered.

Edmund Greenslet of Aviation Services, who publishes the Airline Monitor, said it was too soon to say if one company had succeeded and one failed.

“They’re both still testing the market to see what the need is and see what the demand is.”

And, he noted, since Airbus is starting from scratch, it needs more time to develop its plane, while Boeing could modify an existing design more quickly.