Can China smash the Airbus-Boeing duopoly?

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Each year Airbus and Boeing, the two halves of the global aircraft duopoly, face off at the world’s most prestigious airshow, which alternates between Paris and Farnborough, in the countryside close to London. This year’s event in Farnborough, which opened on July 22nd, was a more subdued clash than usual.

Both firms announced some orders from airlines, but these were mostly small. Boeing is still reeling from the consequences of a panel blowing off a 737 Max, its short-haul aircraft, in January. That model, which first flew in 2016, has been bedevilled with safety issues.

The company has had to slow down production as regulators have investigated its safety procedures, enraging airlines whose deliveries have been delayed. Airbus, which had more planes on display at Farnborough than its chastened rival, has had troubles of its own. Snags in its supply chain have forced it to delay plans to ramp up deliveries of its short-haul jets.

At current production rates it will take Airbus nearly 12 years to produce the 8,600 planes it has on its order books, and a similar time for Boeing to meet its 6,150 unfilled orders. The backdrop is one of soaring demand. Boeing reckons that over the next 20 years the global fleet of passenger planes will need to double to meet the world’s growing appetite for flying, requiring 44,000 new aircraft.

That is roughly twice as many planes as the duopoly managed to deliver in the past 20 years. Could this open the door to aviation’s twosome becoming a threesome? Rob Morris of Cirium, a consultancy, thinks “it is more a case of when, rather than if". Yet the barriers to becoming a maker of large passenger planes remain formidable.