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Airbus Opens Show with Big A350 Order

Ethiopian Airlines, a long-time Boeing customer, has ordered 12 Airbus A350 XWB aircraft, executives of the airline and Airbus said on Sunday.

The contract was the biggest of the deals to be announced on the show’s opening day, though Airbus chief salesman John Leahy told a news conference, amid laughter, that Ethiopian had “refused to pay 
catalogue prices.”

Carriers usually secure discounts for large orders of new aircraft, especially for planes such as the A350 that are still in production.

Ethiopian will take delivery of its long-range A350s starting in 2017, its Chief Executive Officer Girma Wake told the conference at the Dubai Airport Expo.

Ethiopian currently flies 33 jet planes, all of them Boeings. The order for wide-body A350s marks a breakthrough for Airbus with one of Africa’s most 
respected carriers.

Boeing and Airbus together have a duopoly in the production of most of the world’s large commercial aircraft, though China has long-term ambitions of competing with both.

The Dubai Airshow, together with similar top-tier aviation exhibitions in Paris, Singapore and Farnborough in the UK, provides an important arena for Airbus and Boeing to showcase sales of their latest planes.

Boeing has scheduled news conferences at the air show for Monday and Tuesday and may announce sales of its own.

Ethiopian Airlines decided to diversify its all-Boeing fleet for several reasons, Wake told Khaleej Times. One of the most important was simply to reduce its reliance on a 
single supplier.

“It’s always wise to put your eggs in different baskets,” he said.

“We had been looking at the A350 for quite some time,” but the fuel-efficient plane’s original design was not such a good fit for the airline, Wake explained.

“Then whaåt happened is Airbus went back to the drawing board and made a big improvement.”

Airbus redesigned the A350 after the initial version met with a mixed reaction from prospective buyers. Its newer model has been a hit. With its sale to Ethiopian, Airbus has taken orders for a total of 505 of the wide-body planes so far, the European manufacturer said.

Airbus President and Chief Executive Officer Tom Enders acknowledged that the aviation industry is in a funk as a result of the global recession. He told the news conference that business conditions for the next two years are likely to remain “quite challenging.”

However, Enders noted that aviation is still a growth industry. “There’s no question we’ll get through this,” 
he said.

In a separate deal, Airbus announced that Air New Zealand would be the launch customer for eight-foot tall, fuel-saving wingtips that Airbus is introducing on all its future 
A320-family jetliners.

The vertical wingtips, which Airbus calls ‘sharklets,’ can save airlines 4.5 per cent on the fuel costs for each plane, said Leahy, Airbus’ Chief Operating Officer for Customers.

“People wonder why we didn’t bring these out years ago. We wanted to get it right,” he told a news conference.

Boeing offers vertical wing-tips on its competing line of 737 aircraft. Leahy dismissed those as “old-fashioned” and insisted that Airbus sharklets would trim a plane’s maintenance costs and carbon emissions while also enabling it to carry an additional 20 passengers with the same 
amount of fuel.

The sharklets will enter service starting in 2012, and Airbus is pricing them at $900,000 per plane, Leahy said. Airbus now equips A320s with smaller wingtips.

The Middle East is an attractive market for the sharklets, Leahy said, adding that Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways, for one, is “very excited” about them. 


bruce@khaleejtimes.com