Why ISN’T Airbus Attacking Boeing!?

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Never interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake.

As far as I know, the slogan "4 engines, for long haul" came from Virgin Atlantic and Airbus had simply adopted it for this airshow. That's why a Virgin A346 landed in front of the advert.

I always perceived the moto "If it's not Boeing, I'm not going" as safety related. Because, "I'm not going" is a relatively drastic Statement.

Wouldn't the old Boeing slogan "If it's not Boeing I'm not going" carry an implication that other aircraft aren't as safe as Boeing aircraft? It certainly has come back to haunt them in recent years, with plenty of people commenting on Boeing by reversing that slogan. That's probably another reason why using safety as a selling point is a bad idea, if you have a bad spate of accidents your own claims of being safe can come back to bite you, especially if your product is found to be at fault.

You T-shirt has an early De Havilland Comet on it. I am nearly 80 years old and living in the Netherlands. My father was in charge of the ATC equipment at Heathrow Airprt (then called London airport) at the time when the Comet first entered service. At that time it was quite small, and had square windows et all. I used to watch them flying above our house on the approach to Heathrow. And then of course they started crashing.

On Airbus vs Boeing: Increasing production isn't as simpe because you also need to get all parts suppliers and engine suppliers to also be able to increase production. Airbus saw what happened to Boeing pushing the limits and rightfully is more conservative increasing production. Notable is that Airbus has a very very large orders from basket-case airlines that ordered a gazillion aircraft and am pretty sure delivery slots can be negotiated for airlines such as United. Same with lessors.

Airbus: Why should we? It's already done.

Here is a suggestion for a future video. There is a pretty widespread feeling that airplanes with 4 (or 3) engines are safer than airplanes with 2 engines. This seems to be true even among people knowledgeable with aviation. I worked on the development of the 777 and wondered and thought about this quite a bit. I'm not convinced that 2 engine airplanes designed to ETOPS requirements are not inherently safer. A couple reasons: Certain types of engine failures have the potential to take an airplane out. For example, in the case of a turbine disk failure, the segments the disk breaks into cannot be stopped - if one of them is aimed at the airplane structure, it will go right through potentially taking out important structure and systems. There are some ways to attempt to design around this - eg separated and redundant systems runs, but it still seems a problem. All you have to do is look at the Qantas A380 flight 32 engine failure and the astounding amount and variety of damage it did to see this.-this 4 engine airplane was nearly lost due to the failure of a single engine. Or, the Sioux City MD11 crash where the failure of a single engine brought the airplane down. Four engine airplanes having twice as many engines (I guess) about doubles the chances of an engine failure and it could be one of the very bad engine failures endangers the airplane. Another factor is takeoff performance. Commercial airplanes are required to be able to continue a takeoff with the failure of a single engine at a critical point. In this case, a 4 engine airplane loses 1/4 of its thrust, but a 2 engine airplane loses half its thrust. This effectively means a twin has to have more "excess" thrust on normal takeoffs (probably 99.9% of takeoffs) and this extra performance must in some cases must lead to more margin to overcome events that may happen on takeoff? In addition, the ETOPs requirements and ETOPs testing require many safety related changes to the airplane that are not required on 4 engine airplanes. So, how about and investigation and video on 2 engine vs 4 engine safety? Maybe there is even enough data out there now to look at the accident history?

The Airbus ad suggests a recent oceanic accident, even without the small text which basically confirms it. A surprising piece of negative advertising for a market that requires implicit trust. It was a very brave decision for Airbus marketing to continue this theme in later ads. Great video!

Well I think given the problems Airbus has to fullfill all of its current orders its kinda pointless to attack Boeing. They will need another 5-10 Years to even adapt their own production and get their supply fixed to increase production even to their level of demand. Things can backfire real fast if Airbus makes some stupid decisions as well. Another reason would be that a monopoly wouldnt really benefit airbus all that much either because of laws that exist to prevent monopolies. So it might just backfire as well.

Why should Airbus do it? Boeing is doing great by itself...

Video title makes a fair point. Airbus probably has a few Eurofighters lying around that could do the job.

An important name not really mentioned here is John Leahy. Chief commercial officer at Airbus between 94 and 2017, having earlier been head of sales at Airbus North America since the 80's. People might remember his marketing/PR style was often just generally very brash if not outright confrontational at times and given his role was to give Airbus a foothold, especially in North America, him and his approach can be somewhat compared to how Tom Kalinske ran Sega of America in the early-mid 90's, trying to break Nintendo's hold on that market (but with an ultimately more successful long-term result). Some of his quotes certainly implied potential safety concerns, such as saying the 787 was "rushed" to market with unreliable and immature systems. Having effectively achieving his targets and retiring by 2018, its not too unreasonable to say there has been at least a bit of a tone shift at Airbus since.

I think there is another aspect to not hammering Boeing into the ground. If Boeing goes under, it will only be a matter of time before Airbus trips over monopoly regulations. Like Microsoft helped save Apple when it was on the verge of bankruptcy, Airbus is better off not making waves for Boeing.

If you've got there but have been told your return flight has been cancelled, be glad you're not on the ISS.

Another good example where the industry is playing on unfounded fears is with their phase-out of and looking down on turboprops, especially in the US, despite those aircraft not only being just as safe as turbofans, but also far more efficient on short to medium haul.

Honestly, Airbus doesn't need to go after Boeing. All they need to do is keep quiet and let Boeing cook. Why take the bad PR or sour business relationships when you don't have to? There's also the fact that some of their supply line overlaps with Boeing's - including Spirit Aerospace. So they want whatever's going on with Boeing and Spirit to go smoothly and negotiate either a good continuing contract for those parts or at least keep those parts coming while they find another manufacturer. Attacking Boeing doesn't serve either of those goals. While they want more airplane sales (because ofc they do), there's also the fact of when they'd actually be able to deliver those airplanes. So they certainly don't want a massive flood of orders that they won't be able to fulfill for decades. The current situation works pretty well for Airbus - they have one major competitor and they don't have the resources/space to take over if that competitor fails.

You don't have to trash your competition when the media will do it for you. That's a double-edged sword, but why bother when you can ride out the MAX troubles by being the default choice?

The absolute irony of those A340 adverts is that the longest scheduled route operated today (over 18 hours) is being operated by twin engined Airbus A350s.