THE air was pierced with ear-splitting roars, banshee wails and
thunderous explosions. And that was just Boeing and Airbus
insulting each other. With all its noisy fighters, sleek
missiles and other boyish toys, the biennial Paris Air Show
usually lets more testosterone into the atmosphere than is
conducive to civilised commercial competition. But this year the
international aerospace industry has another casus belli.
Politics, which has long governed the defence part of its
business, has now determinedly entered the civil side as well.
The first to fly off the handle was the boss of Airbus
Industrie, Jean Pierson. He accused McDonnell Douglas of
deliberately losing the contract to develop a prototype of
America's Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), in order to make it easier
to merge with Boeing, which reached the final round alongside
Lockheed Martin. This is preposterous: losing the contract was
the coup de grâce for McDonnell as an independent group, but the
blow was not self-inflicted. Ron Woodard, president of