空客首席运营官谈航空产业的未来

- There's a reason that there are only two major manufacturers in the world today, Airbus and Boeing, building aircraft, 100 seats and above. It is difficult to do because you don't just need to get the airplane into the air; you have to get within fractions of a percent of the fuel burn predictions, the range, the weights that you've been promising people. And then you've got to do one other thing: you've got to build it reliably. And when it gets into service, it's got to fly with 99.5 percent dispatch reliability.

- I'm glad you mentioned those two issues. Let's start out with fuel. Obviously the situation in Syria has led to another spike in the fuel prices. This means that fuel efficiency is paramount.

-Absolutely. And that's why we're bringing out our A320 family -- that's our single L family -- in the new version, the NEO, New Engine Option. It takes the proven reliability and fuel efficiency of an A320 and it reduces that fuel burn by over 15 percent. When fuel prices go up, it's a bit of a two-edged sword.Yes, the airlines maybe aren't making as much as money, but it drives the need to replace that older kit with new aircraft, you know, to the fore.

-  A380, is that still the answer to the capacity constraints that we're seeing, particularly in this part of the world?

- Absolutely. I'm going out after we finish this interview to Heathrow to get on an airplane -- and you think about that, air traffic doubles in 15 years. I'm going to look around Heathrow and say, how can we get twice as many airplanes in here? You can't. You can't get 20 percent more airplanes at the Heathrow. In fact, you probably can't get 10 percent more in. They're using it to maximum capacity.So what do you do? It has to be bigger aircraft. It has to be.

- We're seeing all the catastrophes surrounding Boeing's problems with the Dreamliner 787.From an industry perspective, what lessons can be learned?

- Well, what you have to do is get it right the first time. And the airlines get very frustrated if you bring them new technology product but the reliability is not there. We're watching the mistakes they're making and hopefully we're not going to make some of the same ones. We had our own mistakes with the A380 program. We stumbled a bit with the reliability at the beginning with that.We've got that fixed now and we're going to great pains right now with our A350 program to make sure it's mature on day one when we deliver at the end of next year. The airlines are unanimous in saying it's not just the numbers in terms of performance; it's the numbers in terms of reliability. We can't afford an airplane that takes five years to get mature in the field.