John Leahy, sales chief of Airbus, sees Boeing's suggestion that it could revamp its large twin-engine 777 airliner with a new wing as a certain win for him.
And Tim Clark, the president of Emirates - the airline that will soon be the largest operator of 777s in the world - also doubts Boeing's plan can work.
Boeing Commercial Airplane chief Scott Carson broached the 777 re-wing idea in Paris this week, though he didn't rule out two other alternatives: either a bigger 787-10 or even a brand-new airplane to replace the 777.
All three options would be aimed at warding off the threat of the A350-1000, the largest version of Airbus' proposed new composite-plastic airplane that is a little smaller than the 777-300ER but presumably more efficient.
Yet Leahy and Clark, Boeing's archrival and Boeing's top 777 customer, are of one mind: Boeing doesn't have three options. It probably has only one.
In an interview in the Airbus chalet at the Paris Air Show, Leahy took Boeing's re-winging idea first as an opportunity to score points for his A350, saying it is evidence that the Airbus proposal already has scared Boeing into thinking of a major change to its still-young 777.
It's "a perfect endorsement that the 777 as it exists today cannot compete with an A350," Leahy said. "As the A350 gets closer to revenue service, it's obvious that 777 sales will fall unless they can find something to do to change the airplane."
He went on to critique the re-wing option by recalling how Airbus, to compete against the 787, initially offered a revamped A330. The market showed little interest, and 787 sales soared until Airbus went back to the drawing board and launched the all-new A350.
Similarly, he said, the new version of Boeing's aging 747 is not selling well against the new superjumbo, the A380. Only one airline, Lufthansa, has ordered the 747-8 passenger version.
(Will Boeing sell any more of those? "Not if I can do anything about it," Leahy said.)
Leahy's experience tells him it's inadvisable to put a derivative of an older model up against an all-new plane.
"I'd be careful with the temptation to try the intermediate fix," he said.
"As someone who has tried the derivative approach, I ... think they'll soon discover that the only thing that can work competitively against an airplane that has been drawn on a clean sheet of paper is another airplane on a clean sheet," Leahy said.
For Clark of Emirates, his advice to Boeing is only a little less definitive.
"Re-winging, I'm not sure about," he said in an interview in Paris. "I'd be thinking seriously about an all-new aircraft."
Clark is a great fan of the 777. He has 74 in his fleet today and 32 more on order. Just this week, Emirates took delivery of a brand-new ultralong-haul 777-200LR freighter.
But Clark leads an airline with vast ambition and an atypical appetite for very large, very long-range airplanes. Emirates flies five A380s today and has an astonishing 53 more of the giant airplanes on order.
(The A380 has a list price of $327 million, though the estimated market value is $185 million, according to aircraft valuation firm Avitas.)
Part of the reason for this skewed preference is the Emirates route network. Because Clark plans to cover the whole world from Dubai, he's been pushing Boeing for years to improve the 777-300ER to give it the extra range he needs.
By applying new 787 technology to the current 777, he believes Boeing could get a 7 to 8 percent improvement in fuel efficiency, and hence extra range. But though he believes that "Boeing is great at doing wings" and has "some great wizards" who might be able to do it, the 777 wing is already so efficient Clark said he doubts a new one would give enough improvement.
"We want the 777-ER to do the West Coast" of the U.S. direct from Dubai, Clark said. "That's a 16.5-hour mission. The only way we'll get that is produce a new airplane."
And in Clark's opinion that new airplane shouldn't be a larger version of the 787, the potential 787-10 that Boeing is considering. He believes the 787 cannot be stretched as big as the 777.
So his clear preference, he said, is a new 777-size airplane with the economics of the 787, likely an all-composite plastic plane like the Dreamliner.
There could certainly be an element of bluff in Carson's re-wing pronouncement in Paris, since Boeing won't want Airbus to know which way it will go.
It's likely Boeing executives themselves don't yet know what they'll do, and won't decide until Airbus firms up the technical detail on the still-theoretical A350-1000, which isn't supposed to enter service until 2015.
Though both Leahy and Clark are astute judges of the airplane market, each has his own agenda.
Clark wants that new airplane to be big and long-range and superefficient.
And Leahy, who has certainly been known to bluff in public, just wants to win.
Boeing may blow off anything from Leahy.
And though executives will certainly sit up straight while they listen to Clark, they'll have to decide if his uncommon needs will apply to enough other airlines to translate into a sufficiently large market.
Such judgments are what make the airplane business an enormous gamble
