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  3. Distant indeed seem the days when the two great rivals of commercial aviatio

Distant indeed seem the days when the two great rivals of commercial aviatio

游客2023-12-05  26
问题     Distant indeed seem the days when the two great rivals of commercial aviation, Boeing and Airbus, would use big air shows to trumpet hundreds of new orders. This year’s Paris Air Show was a much more sombre affair, even if the Boeing-Airbus feud still took centre stage.
    There were one or two bright spots. Airbus was able to boast of a firm order for ten of its wide-body A350s from AirAsia X. John Leahy, its top salesman, expects deliveries in 2009 to match the record 483 in 2008. Boeing, which was hit by a prolonged strike last year, will probably deliver more aircraft this year than last. Both firms built up huge backlogs in the fat years: each has orders for about 3,500 planes.
    But many of those may soon evaporate. Giovanni Bisignani, the boss of IATA, the trade body that speaks for most airlines, gave warning earlier this month that his members might defer as many as 30% of aircraft deliveries next year. He also almost doubled his forecast for the industry’s cumulative losses in 2009, to $9 billion.
    Both Mr. Leahy and Jim McNerney, the chief executive of Boeing, think that Mr. Bisignani is overdoing the gloom. But they concede that potential customers may find purchases hard to finance. Another issue is the cost of fuel. Mr. McNerney thinks the recent increase in the oil price should encourage carriers to replace elderly gas guzzlers with efficient new planes. But if the price "spikes over $100" all bets are off.
    The two aviation giants agree on one other thing: the industry will not get a successor to its ubiquitous short-haul workhorses, the 737 and the A320, for more than a decade. That is partly because the 15-20% efficiency gain that airlines say they want from the next generation is, says Mr. McNerney, "a bar that keeps moving north" thanks to the continuous improvements of 1-2% a year that the manufacturers are making to existing planes.
    Moreover, both Boeing and Airbus are conserving cash for a long and bitter scrap to dominate the market for long-haul aircraft with up to 350 seats. Boeing’s troubled 787 Dreamliner will at last take to the air this month, two years late. The production problems that stemmed from both the revolutionary use of composites and an extended global supply chain appear to have been overcome. To speed up deliveries of the 787, for which Boeing has received more than 860 orders, Mr. McNerney is planning a second assembly line.
    The delays to the 787 have been a godsend for Airbus. Its rival, the slightly bigger A350, is on track to fly in early 2012 after a painful gestation. With nearly 500 orders, Airbus claims that the A350 is selling even faster than the record-breaking 787 did at the same stage in its development. The biggest concern for Boeing, however, is not that the A350 will take sales from the 787 , but that its largest variant, the A350-1000, will be a strong rival to its successful 777. Mr McNerney says that Boeing can afford to wait and see how great a threat the biggest A350 is. But according to Airbus executives, Boeing will be faced with the dilemma of merely upgrading the 777 or taking the bigger and more costly step of building a replacement.
    The A350 and the 787 are at the heart of the long-running and acrimonious dispute between Boeing and Airbus at the World Trade Organisation(WTO)over state subsidies for large commercial aircraft. This week European governments declared that they were ready to contribute 3.5 billion($4.9 billion)of reimbursable launch aid to the 11 billion cost of developing the A350. The announcement had Boeing executives scurrying to their BlackBerrys to condemn what they saw as a "provocative" move given that the WTO is expected to issue a ruling on Boeing’s complaint within weeks(a ruling on a counter-complaint by Airbus is due later in the year).
    Louis Gallois, the chief executive of EADS, the parent company of Airbus, denied there was anything odd about the timing: "We do not plead guilty," he said. "Our support is much more transparent than Boeing’s. We have fully repaid with interest the support we received for the A320 and A330 and we are already paying back on the A380(super-jumbo). " Tom Enders, the chief executive of Airbus, added that the aid was aimed only at "levelling the playing field" and that the European Union had described the 787 as the most subsidised commercial aircraft in history. [br] What does "levelling the playing field" in the last paragraph mean?
选项 A、Making the ground smooth.
B、Making the competition fair.
C、Supporting the development of new aircraft.
D、Reimbursing previous subsidies.
答案 B
解析 语义题 根据最后一段引述的空客方面人士的表态，空客认为波音787也得到了国家补贴，暗示空客为避免在竞争中落后，也必须获得相应的补贴，因而可推断“levelling the playing field”的正确含义为[B]“让竞争变得公平”。
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