As commercial air carriers slowly recovered from the negative financial fallout of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, aircraft manufacturing rivals The Boeing Go. (Seattle, Wash.) and Airbus Industrie (Toulouse, France) developed significantly different views of the future of commercial air travel. Each cited roughly the same growth statistics, in terms of future travel, and predicted more intense competition between carriers. But Airbus reasoned that airlines will decrease the number of nonstop flights between large numbers of paired cities even as populations continue to concentrate in major metropolitan areas. Banking on these predictions, Airbus conceived the super-jumbo A380, which could be configured to carry from 555 to as many as 890 passengers and fly at lower per-passenger costs. Boeing, on the other hand, had come to expect these factors to stimulate an increase in new nonstop flights and growth in the number of trips between paired cities. According to Boeing, this will tend to discourage development of planes with an increased number of passenger seats. By Boeing's calculation, jumbo craft (i.e., Boeing's 747 and Airbus' A380), will account for only 4 percent (790) of the total commercial jet fleet, while almost 4,300 are expected to be regional jets over the next two decades. Moreover, rising fuel prices underscored airline interest in greater efficiency, especially in the mid-sized aircraft that make up the greatest number of in-service commercial jets.
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