En artikkel fra 1985 i Fortune
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortu...6817/index.htm
We're out to see to it that the A320 has no more than four years in the market,'' says Dean Thornton, head of Boeing's commercial aircraft division. New Boeing planes, he thinks, can nip the A320 long before it approaches breakeven.
Still, Airbus will have to evolve at supersonic speed if Pierson and his team are to narrow Boeing's and McDonnell Douglas's big edge in production efficiency. Steep learning curves, with manufacturing costs falling sharply as more units are produced, dominate the economics of building airplanes. With over 130 Boeing and 85 McDonnell Douglas planes rolling off production lines each year vs. just 35 Airbuses, the Americans' cost advantage appears insurmountable.
It predicts that airlines will buy 4,160 A320- type planes over the next 20 years and that more than 900 of them will be Airbuses. In contrast, the consensus at Boeing and McDonnell Douglas and among security analysts is that fewer than 3,000 A320-type planes will be sold in the period and that one-third will be delivered before the first A320 rolls out. Even if Airbus gets 25% of the remaining orders, it would sell only 500 planes, 100 fewer than its projected breakeven level.
.....Boeing and McDonnell Douglas have some technical razzle-dazzle of their own in the works that they hope will make the A320 obsolete by the early 1990s