Airbus and Boeing face increasingly tough production decisions as they try to hone aircraft strategies for late next decade, made all the more difficult due to mixed messages from engine makers. Sorting out what to do in the narrow-body arena is likely to prove particularly challenging. The two airframe makers are weighing a bewildering array of dissimilar engine candidates being pushed by their suppliers, ranging from the traditional architecture of CFM International's Leap-X, to Pratt & Whitney's geared turbofan, to Rolls-Royce's open rotor (see p. 39). Moreover, with the introduction of Bombardier's CSeries, there is new competition in the single-aisle realm, even though Airbus and Boeing shrug off the program launch as hardly a threat, since they plan to focus on bigger seat counts (130-250) in their respective 737 and A320 replacement offerings.
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