Crisis? What crisis?

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: It is usually axiomatic that when your customers are in trouble, you are too. But at last week’s biennial Farnborough airshow, the aviation industry’s biggest bash this year, that was not how it looked. With the exception of a few airlines from the Middle East, for which high oil prices are helping to fund an expansion, airlines are in deep trouble. According to IATA, their trade association, if fuel costs stay at present levels, the world’s airlines will lose over $6 billion this year.

The pain is greatest in America where competition is fierce, many planes are old and fuel has to be bought with weak dollars. But just about everybody is hurting. Martin Broughton, the chairman of British Airways, said this week that the airline was “up to its neck in perhaps the biggest crisis the aviation industry has ever known” and was responding by cutting flights. Even Cathay Pacific, one of the most efficient operators in the hitherto booming Asia-Pacific market, issued a profit warning on July 2nd. A number of Indian carriers also look vulnerable.

Yet despite the mounting crisis within the airline business, the mood at Boeing and Airbus, the two firms that own the market for large commercial aircraft, is oddly sanguine. During past downturns in what has always been a highly cyclical industry, the planemakers have suffered along with their customers. But this time, they think it might be different.

One reason is that both still have bulging order books with production backlogs that will take years to work through (see chart). Boeing’s head of commercial aircraft, Scott Carson, predicted last week that new orders would continue to outstrip production, so that its $271 billion backlog, the largest in its history, will continue to grow. The same is true of Airbus. Its total order backlog is more than 3,700 planes, the equivalent of about six years’ production. Its chief salesman, John Leahy, was hoping to end the week with another 200 orders in his pocket.