John Leahy, the chief operating officer - customers at the Airbus aircraft manufacturing concern, believes that Chinese aircraft manufacturers will be able to offer serious competition to the industry’s leaders Boeing and Airbus in 25 years, the CFTS correspondent reports.
"I think that China will become one of the major players on the market of commercial aircraft within 20-25 years," Leahy said during the Airbus Innovation Days conference in Toulouse.
According to him, when Airbus began bringing its aircraft to market, it took 25 years for it to create a line of products, increase the reliability of the products, and build a support system and an international network.
"We sold only 2,000 aircraft in the first 25 years. That is 14% of our total sales volume, and any newcomer to the market will have to go through this route,” said Leahy.
He stressed that even a good airplane would find it very difficult to compete with a family of aircraft that has already been launched into mass production.
