Airline Official Questions Estimate Of Big Jet Market

British Airways Plc’s chief fleet planner said the demand projections underpinning Airbus Industrie’s plan to spend at least $8 billion on a new, 550-seat “superjumbo” jetliner are too optimistic.

Airbus said it believes as many as 1,380 of the double-decker jumbo jets could be bought by airlines by 2014, a figure both its arch-rival Boeing Co. of Seattle and BA dispute. Boeing figures world demand might not top 470 of the jetliners, and bowed out of the market earlier.

At an airline conference in Geneva, BA’s top fleet planner Ron Muddle said the airline itself estimates actual demand for the plane “somewhere in between” the competing Boeing and Airbus figures.

“The top end of the spectrum takes a fairly rosy view of the economic motivation for carriers to buy that aircraft,” Muddle told about 300 industry executives and analysts.

Airline support for the new big jet is critical. The Airbus aircraft, still on the drawing board, won’t be built until it wins enough firm orders to launch production.

BA, the world’s biggest long-haul airline, remains one of the few in the business which has said it will buy the bigger aircraft.

Boeing in December dropped plans to build two larger, longer-range versions of its 747 jetliner because it said the market wasn’t big enough to justify the $7 billion development costs.