John J. Leahy is a big-time salesman, but this time he truly has a jumbo-size sales job on his hands.
As the pitchman-in-chief for Airbus Industrie, Leahy aims to nail down commitments the company needs before stockholders agree to build the 550-seat A3XX jet. The job has required a change in tactics: While he usually sells planes by stressing to airlines how much money they can make flying them, he is taking his pitch for the A3XX to passengers.
In advertisements, interviews and promotional materials aimed at consumers, Leahy promises a virtual “cruise ship in the sky” to help travelers overcome the funk and boredom as day turns to night in the jet stream.
By conjuring up images of happy folks dropping their kids off at the airborne nursery en route to the gym, or roaming among casinos, duty-free shops and fine restaurants at 30,000 feet, he is betting the buzz will grow so strong that airlines can’t afford not to buy the $225 million A3XX. An Airbus television ad campaign in Europe compares the A3XX with the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. “Did the Temple of Artemis have showers?” asks a deep-voiced announcer. “Did the Statue of Zeus have a gym?”
The campaign, which has run in some U.S.-circulated magazines but hasn’t appeared on American television, has excited travelers.
“An exercise room–that would be the best,” says James Watkins, a software consultant from Redmond, Wash. The 40-year-old Watkins, who logged more than 120,000 air miles last year, muses that he would “get up and exercise every three or four hours” on long flights and perhaps play a few hands of cards in the casino.
But the airlines aren’t buying this flight of fancy. Many of the buyers who have expressed interest in the A3XX say they plan to use the extra space to haul more people and freight.
“Forget Jacuzzis and restaurants,” says Maurice Flanagan, group managing director of Emirates, the international carrier for United Arab Emirates and a big supporter of the A3XX. “It’s a people carrier. It’s crazy to think of anything else.”
While Airbus and Leahy talk up a new era of leisury comfort, that era is still in the theoretical stage. Though Airbus held a commercial launch of the project in June, that merely started the process of seeking out firm orders; the company says an industrial launch won’t take place until it has an unspecified number of “quality” commitments. Singapore Airlines has agreed to buy 10 of the planes for $8.6 billion, with options for 15 more, if the plane is built, and several other carriers have made commitments to buy.
But even potential buyers such as Lufthansa of Germany and International Lease Finance Corp., the aircraft-leasing unit of U.S. insurer American International Group Inc., say they doubt all the envisioned amenities will stick, if they are tried at all. Even on a flying behemoth, any use of space and weight must pay off, and carriers say that for all but the highest of high fliers, air travel will remain a commodity in a mass-transit world.
Those skeptical of the promised pleasures aboard the A3XX say Airbus might benefit by looking backward–at a future that rival Boeing Co. and its customers prophesied as the U.S. planemaker launched the jumbo-jet age with development of its 747 more than 30 years ago.
As the first 747s came off the assembly line, airline capacity far exceeded the demand for seats, allowing carriers’ imaginations to run free. Some of this brainstorming turned into amenities: Pan Am set up a ritzy dining room on the upper deck of its 747s. Stand-up bars and sit-down lounges sprang up on nearly every major U.S. carrier, including a lounge on Continental Airlines Inc.’s main deck with a full-size piano certified for flight, by the Federal Aviation Administration. Some carriers installed as many as three bars per plane on Hawaii-bound flights, with one for each class of service, and musicians rollicked down the aisles on some early United Airlines 747 flights.
One 1970 newspaper ad from American Airlines touted its soon-to-be-deployed 747s as “luxury liners of the air,” alongside sketches of an executive pacing in a tastefully appointed on-board office, dictating memos to a smiling secretary. In roomy private quarters next door, a mom in a nightgown reads bedtime stories to her preschooler tucked into a bed, while the text gushes about staterooms, drawing rooms, a penthouse and even “coach seats almost a yard wide.”
“We all start out advertising that way because it’s attractive to the customer,” says Robert Baker, vice chairman of AMR Corp., parent of American Airlines, “but in the end it never really happens.”
Indeed, the big ideas dried up as expensive fuel, deregulation and competition brought airlines down to earth and demand for seats took off.
Baker says American may consider purchases of the A3XX some day, if the carrier builds up its presence on routes to Asia, but he believes passenger perks would be limited to more comfortable seats with vast entertainment options, such as “a jillion movies.”
That the carriers’ plans are at odds with Airbus’ luxury-liner-in-the-sky vision doesn’t faze the Connecticut-born Leahy, a 15-year veteran of the pan-European Airbus consortium based in Toulouse, France. As a salesman at Airbus’s North American unit, he landed the first major U.S. deal for the company by selling planes to Northwest Airlines. In 1992, he broke the grip held by Boeing on United Airlines with a big-ticket sale of narrow-body A320s.
The A3XX development project with its expected price tag of about $12 billion may turn out to be Leahy’s toughest sell.
Dietmar Kirchner, a Lufthansa senior vice president, recalls that the airline’s executives mocked Leahy and his team when they waxed poetic about the A3XX amenities at a presentation. “We asked, `Where are the seats?”‘ Kirchner recalls. He remembers a smiling Leahy saying he was “just trying to show you the possibilities.”
It’s an uphill battle. Juergen Weber, Lufthansa’s chief executive, says: “It doesn’t help to have a big [lounge] if it raises your seat-mile costs above what they were before.” Weber wants costs cut 20 percent compared with the current 747. “This must be guaranteed.”
As airline executives challenge Leahy’s vision, he has suggested that main decks could feature only a pair of “welcoming” cocktail lounges and a couple of sweeping staircases, while shopping and other pastimes could be put below, on the cargo deck.
John Noble, who runs the Minnesota-based Northwestern Travel Services agency for executives, says he hopes Airbus keeps pressing for distractions and innovation. He favors a disco in the cargo hold.
But Noble flew on early 747s and other first-of-a-kind planes, and he points out that even the simplest gimmick can get tricky. He recalls sitting on a China Airlines flight introducing new service years ago, when flight attendants came through First Class offering to take photos of executive passengers and the women at their sides. “All the businessmen would say, `No! This is not the Mrs.!”‘
