Airbus Industrie v Boeing; Boeing v Airbus. British Aerospace (BAe) with Lockheed Martin; Lockheed Martin perhaps with Airbus. Embraer perhaps with Aero International (Regional) (AI(R)) If there has been a theme to the 1997 Paris air show, it is that of transatlantic relations, good and bad.
It is a theme beset with immense complications, but out of it one thing emerges clearly: the next stage of the re-organisation of the world aerospace industry is going to involve inter-regional tie-ups, and there is precious little time left for intra-regional re-organisations before that happens.
European industry chiefs are still talking - with varying degrees of enthusiasm - of the urgent need for restructuring in their region. The talk (and the enthusiasm) is being led by British Aerospace and Daimler-Benz Aerospace, both of whose heads have been advocating the creation of a European aerospace giant to rival Lockheed Martin and Boeing. A strong manufacturer, however, needs a strong home market: the inability of especially Germany to deliver firm orders to would-be European champions like Eurofighter and NH Industries is hampering the development of that market, and of the industry serving it. The enthusiasm for a more-unified Europe is being further dampened by the heads of the French industry, who remain convinced of the need to first build a strong, vertically integrated French combine before entering into any wider co-operation.
That lack of enthusiasm for a European solution in the interim is driven by several issues, amongst them a reluctance to see control of civil-aircraft design and manufacture going away from Aerospatiale into a new Airbus company, and a firm conviction that France should not lose control of design, manufacture and (crucially) the selling of combat aircraft.
While the Europeans try to sort out these and similar restructuring difficulties, the strong US companies with which an integrated European industry would compete are moving at a pace which threatens to make such moves irrelevant. Lockheed Martin, for instance, has taken BAe into its Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) team.
Should it win the JSF competition, the resulting Lockheed Martin aircraft would not only be ordered in its thousands to the US forces but could conceivably satisfy far more of the UK's future needs than merely the replacement for the Royal Navy's BAe Sea Harriers. Should the JSF become (as seems likely) the ultimate replacement for the Lockheed Martin F-16 as the world's favourite export combat aircraft, it will inevitably acquire extra capabilities not required by the USA but essential to countries to whom the luxury of the ultra- sophisticated Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 are not an option. That, in turn, could mean that BAe is already locked into a programme which could satisfy some, if not all, of the requirements of the RAF's Future Offensive Aircraft System - thus harming the opportunity for the wider European industry to develop such a machine.
Similar complications lurk within the civil-airframe business. Whatever is said in public about their lack of interest in investing in the Airbus A3XX, in private the heads of Lockheed Martin are keen on rebuilding a presence in large commercial aircraft - although not as a prime airframer. Crucially, unlike several of the existing partners in Airbus, Lockheed Martin has the resources which would allow it to allocate a couple of billion dollars to a large airliner project - but only if that project could show an acceptable return.
If Airbus decided to build a new aircraft which its existing partners (or their respective government and private bankers) could not fund, there are prospective transatlantic partners which could. If a Lockheed Martin or similar entity came on board, Airbus would cease to be a European combine battling with the Americans, but a truly international company fighting in an international market.
Such moves in both civil and military markets might make all sorts of sense in commercial terms, but they would render the concept of the single European entity, and of its fight against the transatlantic enemy, obsolete long before Europe's snail-like progress towards consolidation comes to anything.
Source: Flight International
