Flight International - 10Dec2019

COMMENT

flightglobal.com 10-16 December 2019 | Flight International | 5

Late starter

Time machine

Boeing and Airbus’s legal wrangling over state subsidies offers a captivating

insight into a parallel universe in which the A380 project was never realised

Poised to gain lift?

I

t has certainly taken a long time, but

Airbus at last looks to be entering

smoother air with its long-troubled

A400M Atlas tactical transport.

As the 10th anniversary of the

European airlifter’s first flight passes on 11

December, the company finds itself at a

literal tipping point. It has now delivered

85 of the turboprop-powered type –

almost half way through its total order-

book of 174 examples for a combined

eight nations.

Back in the heady days before the

A400M’s formal launch in May 2003 and

the programme’s subsequent spiral into

contractual chaos, Airbus confidently

spoke of attracting export orders for 200

examples. Its total to date is just four – all

of which have already been delivered to

Malaysia.

There can be little genuine surprise that

other nations have not yet got on board,

bearing in mind the years of engine and

gearbox problems, production delays and

financial wrangling that have dominated

the last decade.

Keeping launch customers happy is, of

course, an essential task if international

buyers are to be convinced by a product,

and by Airbus’s own admission, only in

2018 – 15 years into the programme – did

it succeed in hitting all of its promised

goals.

Perhaps things are set to change, how-

ever. A new “re-baselining” deal struck in

June – after two tough years of negotia-

tions – gives the company until the end of

2021 to deliver the remaining tactical ca-

pabilities that convinced seven European

countries to fund its development and

production.

Having slowed its annual output to

ensure continued production for the next

decade, finally delivering with the Atlas

at home could yet see the A400M soar on

the export stage. ■

See Feature P

O

ne of the most fascinating aspects of the

World Trade Organization (WTO) dis-

pute has nothing to do with the boasts about

penalties and tariffs, or the squabble over who

gained the greatest advantage from govern-

ment hand-outs – but rather the potential real-

ities that might have materialised if the contro-

versial financial support had never existed.

Alternative history as a genre has thrown

up all manner of speculative fiction exploring

the effects of conflicts differently resolved,

through such works as the historian essay col-

lection If It Had Happened Otherwise and

Philip Roth’s vision of aviation pioneer

Charles Lindbergh as US president in The

Plot Against America.

Crucial to the WTO panel’s deliberations has

been the decision as to which parallel universe

should apply to the transatlantic row between

Airbus and Boeing, to work out the most accu-

rate version of events that failed to happen.

This parallel universe is formally named

the “appropriate counterfactual” and, natu-

rally, the two sides have disagreed on which

scenario is the more “appropriate” – the Euro-

peans insisting that the revision of history

should begin with the subsidies being with-

drawn in December 2011, while their US op-

ponents argued, successfully, that the subsi-

dies should be considered never to have been

granted in the first place.

From this premise a butterfly-effect ripple

emerges in which Emirates becomes a signifi-

cant 747-8 operator, and Airbus – forced to

choose between launching the A380 or A

in 2014 – views investment in a double-deck

behemoth as unjustifiable in a declining high-

capacity aircraft market, and ditches the su-

perjumbo before it even leaves the drawing

board. And although Airbus pursues the

A350 and the A330neo, belated development

means such carriers as Virgin Atlantic opt for

a contrasting fleet composition.

Where this exercise falls down, of course, is

in the assumption that the alternative time-

line exists in splendid isolation. While this

makes sense for the sake of legal wrangling,

the complex interaction of cause and effect on

a global scale reduces any retroactive prog-

nostication to guesswork, and inevitably de-

taches any financial settlement from reality.

But it nonetheless offers, to an industry that

thrives on imagination, a bewitching glimpse

into a what-if world in which the A380 re-

mains an unrealised curiosity, replaced by

any number of domino-chain spin-off reper-

cussions – an intriguing tapestry woven by

the lawyers on either side of this otherwise

exhausting, and seemingly pointless, spat. ■

Strange things are afoot

Orion/Kobal/Shutterstock

See This Week P

Alternative history has thrown

up all manner of speculative

fiction exploring the effects of

conflicts differently resolved

Crown Copyright