Bombardier v Boeing: How the battle for our skies landed in Belfast
Building planes is a business that has an importance that spreads far beyond the balance sheet - Adam Parsons explains.
Wednesday 27 September 2017 10:56, UK
You might think that it's up to aviation companies to decide how much they want to charge for their products.
You might imagine that's how markets work, but, in the world of selling planes, that's not right at all.
On both sides of the Atlantic, lawyers spend a lifetime doing nothing other than working for one aviation company taking action against another.
Few industries are so utterly wedded to the courts as this one.
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Why? Well partly because there really aren't that many companies that manufacture big aeroplanes for the commercial world, so it's very competitive between the handful that do.
The biggest of them is American - Boeing. The second biggest is European - Airbus. And then, some way behind, there's the Canadian company, Bombardier.
If you want to understand the dynamics of this, though, you need to start in one place - the battle between the two giants at the top.
In the star-spangled corner is Boeing, America's $250bn aviation giant, a company worth five times as much as Ford and General Motors put together.
In the blue and yellow stars corner is Airbus, the European conglomerate that produces the world's biggest passenger aircraft. And between Boeing and Airbus is a wide ocean, and a deep well of mistrust.
These two enormous companies live on some kind of a huge corporate see-saw. What pushes down one tends to drive up the other.
Put bluntly, if an airline is somehow persuaded not to buy a Boeing, then it might well be getting an Airbus instead. Hence they've developed a protracted Tom and Jerry-style battle, constantly trying to hobble the other.
It was only three weeks ago that Boeing declared victory in its latest legal bout against Airbus.
The European company claimed that Boeing had received an illegal Government subsidy when it built a factory in Washington State. The World Trade Organisation first backed Airbus, and then changed its mind. Boeing declared victory; Airbus said it would fight on.
Behind these companies sits the might of huge Governments. Both America and the European Union push the rules as hard as they can to support their own aviation industries.
Building planes is one of those businesses that has an importance that spreads far beyond the balance sheet - it has strategic significance, employs highly-skilled people, and is allied to national prestige.
Boeing has plans to tip its toes into the world of European manufacturing by opening a component factory in Sheffield but it is a wholeheartedly American company. Airbus has facilities in Alabama and China, but is seen by everyone as a European company.
Bombardier is a smaller concern, but faces a familiar accusation - that the £740m investment it received from the province of Quebec was used to subsidise the cost of making the company's C-Series jets, allowing them to be sold into the American market at lower than cost price - effectively letting Bombardier unfairly "buy" a share of the market.
Boeing's guard dogs woke up, snarled and sent off the writs.
For Northern Ireland, there is the nervousness about jobs. When Bombardier took over the former Shorts factory in Belfast, it safeguarded livelihoods and also a rare skillbase.
Little wonder that Theresa May, worried about the support of the DUP, got on the phone to Donald Trump and asked him to intervene.
The Canadian Government, meanwhile, is also sticking up for Bombardier - it is said to have threatened to cancel a $5bn order of Boeing F-18 fighter jets.
Aviation works like that - huge legal battles, Government interference and cutting-edge engineering. Boeing and Airbus are producing planes at breakneck speed, and both are worrying about a global slowdown that could shred demand.
That's why they do everything they can to protect their markets, and why Boeing has launched its missiles towards Bombardier and Belfast.