In 1988, news of a changing world frequently dominated lunchtime talk in the Airbus dining room. At the top of the agenda for discussion was the approaching end of the Cold War—the unremitting standoff between East and West that had gripped the world for four decades. Under the benign influence of the recently elected Communist party general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the late 1980s had seen the Soviet Union embark on the twin paths of perestroika, or restructuring, and the equally painful process of glasnost, or openness.
By 1989, with Gorbachev’s appointment as president of the Soviet Union, the radical reforms in the U.S.S.R. became a prelude to the equally sudden meltdown of the Communist regimes throughout eastern Europe. The astounding spectacle of the Berlin Wall being pulled, pushed, and bulldozed out of existence in November 1989 appeared to be a bellwether of a new epoch of global freedom and peaceful coexistence.
To aircraft manufacturers and airlines, these events heralded the potential for travel and trade on an unprecedented scale. Business flourished while air passenger traffic climbed at or above a worldwide annual average of 5 percent, with some 1.2 billion travelers making a journey by air that year. For reassurance, Airbus needed to look no further than the Asia-Pacific market, where the relentless expansion of the Tiger economies of the region fueled double-digit surges in passenger air traffic. By the end of the 1980s, the Asia-Pacific region already accounted for more than 21 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP), a 50 percent increase since 1970, and was forecast to grow to about 27 percent by 2000. Since GDP is generally the single most important variable when predicting air traffic volume, planners recognized the clear signal that Asian-based airlines and their international competitors would be in line for expansion.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that more people traveling created a demand for more aircraft. But more aircraft also meant more congestion, and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic turned their attention to predicting how this would affect the size of future aircraft. Would runway and airspace capacity limits dictate a move to larger and larger aircraft, or would infrastructure improvements and more efficient medium-sized aircraft be better ways to meet the rising demand?
This was the pivotal $12 billion question that would launch the race for the next-generation superjumbo, and that would ultimately drive a philosophical wedge between Airbus and Boeing for more than a decade.
In Asia, at least, the omens clearly warned of congestion to come, and statistics indicated the devastating possibility of virtual gridlock in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, in particular. Figures showed that weekly aircraft arrivals and departures at the top 10 major airports in the region jumped from 6,500 in 1971 to 10,000 in 1980, and to 16,600 in 1989. The trend indicated that total arrivals and departures would reach 27,000 per week by 1999, or an average increase of 60 percent in airport congestion.