Dogfight: The Transatlantic Battle over Airbus

Dogfight examines the intense rivalry of the past two decades between the European Airbus consortium and the major US aircraft manufacturers, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. From the Americans’ point of view, Airbus has been heavily subsidised by its supporting governments - indeed nearly nationalised - and not exposed to the risks and disciplines of the market place. From the European perspective, Airbus has been a standard-bearer for European technological, manufacturing and marketing prowess in the face of historical American industrial domination. This dispute has spilled over the bounds of the purely commercial and become a serious transatlantic trade issue. Although there has been a certain amount of admiring writing about Airbus in Europe, there has been no previous attempt to weigh the issues even-handedly by exploring them on both sides of the Atlantic. Dogfight examines the roots of the conflict in the mid-60s and carries the story forward to the tentative agreement on some of the outstanding issues reached by the US administration and the European Commission in the spring of 1992. In placing the controversy in its political and international context, the author has had access to many of the key players in the industry in both Europe and the United States, and has interviewed a large number of politicians, officials and senior airline and aircraft executives.