Boeing vs Airbus
In today's marketplace, distinct differences in the way competitive products work have become increasingly rare. But functional product differentiation is exactly what the rivalry between the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner is all about: Two companies with fundamentally different products, based on diametrically opposite visions of the future, engaged in a Hatfields versus McCoys battle with billions of dollars at stake.
Each company has made a series of big bets.
The Airbus A380 super-jumbo is a plane for the annals of aviation history. When it goes into service later this year, it will be the biggest, baddest airliner around, capable of ferrying from 550 to 800 passengers (depending on configuration). With …show more content…
Airbus organized four teams of designers, one from each of its partners to propose new technologies for its future aircraft designs. The designs would be presented in 1992 and the most competitive designs would be used.
In January 1993, Boeing and several companies in the Airbus consortium started a joint feasibility study of an aircraft known as the Very Large Commercial Transport , aiming to form a partnership to share the limited market . This joint study was abandoned two years later, Boeing's interest having decreased because analysts thought that such a product would unlikely earn the $15-billion in development costs. Despite the fact that only two airlines had expressed public interest in purchasing such a plane, Airbus was already pursuing its own large plane project. Analysts suggested that Boeing instead would pursue stretching their 747 design, and that air travel was already moving away from the hub and spoke system that consolidated traffic into large planes, and toward more non-stop routes that could be served by smaller planes.
In June 1994, Airbus began developing its own very large airliner, designated the A3XX . Airbus considered several designs, including an odd side-by-side combination of two fuselages from the A340, which was Airbus’s largest jet at the time. The A3XX was pitted against the VLCT study and Boeing’s own New Large Aircraft successor to the 747 . From 1997 to 2000, as the East Asian financial