Consortium Cancels 19 Qatari A350 Orders

Qatar Airways and Airbus have, for months, been fighting in the British courts over multi-hundred-million-dollar losses incurred by the airline subsequent the grounding of 21 of its 53 A350 long-range, wide-body airliners.

Qatar’s civil aviation authority deemed the airplanes un-airworthy following the discovery of substantial deterioration of their exterior paint and protective coatings.

Airbus concedes the deterioration is premature, but maintains it presents no risk to safety of flight. Airbus’s asseverations of safety are echoed by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA)—over which Airbus exercises considerable influence.

Qatar Airways has prevailed upon the court to award it more than $600-million in damages, while Airbus—uncharacteristically reactive and unyielding—responded initially to the carrier’s invocation of litigious recourse by rescinding an unrelated Qatar Airways order for fifty A321neos—thereby portraying the conflict as a contractual matter rather than one of aircraft safety.

On Friday, 09 September 2022, Airbus stepped-up its retributory campaign by summarily canceling a Qatar Airways order for 19 additional A350 aircraft. The European consortium ascribed its action to a belief that the air carrier—which refused to take delivery of two A350s in February—no longer wished to honor its contracts with Airbus. Contrariwise, Qatar Airways claims Airbus canceled the order outright—prior to the carrier having occasion to refuse the aircraft.

Antithetical claims notwithstanding, Qatar Airways had previously and publicly asserted that it would refuse future deliveries of Airbus aircraft until the airframer provided a full root-cause analysis of the A350’s integumentary maladies.

In July 2022, Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker—who’s called Airbus’s contentious tenor and insouciant actions relating to the ongoing A350 dispute "a matter of considerable regret and frustration”—finalized an order for 25 Boeing 737 MAX 10 jets to bolster his company’s narrow-body fleet.

News of the Qatar-Boeing deal compelled Airbus’s attorneys to request documentation of the agreement for possible admission in the A350 court-proceedings. At the Farnborough International Airshow—where the MAX 10 sale was announced—Mr. Al Baker remarked that he failed to fathom Airbus's interest in the MAX agreement or its relevance to the London trial "when the MAX has no relation to the A321 order that [Airbus] erroneously, illegally canceled."

Renowned for his candor, Mr. Al Baker summarized his disappointment with Airbus, stating: “Boeing is a far mightier aircraft maker than Airbus.”

FMI: www.qatarairways.com