European planemaker Airbus said Thursday it was abandoning production of its A340 long-haul four-engine aircraft, which failed to compete with Boeing's 777. “We have accepted reality. We have not sold any A340s for nearly two years,” Airbus finance director Hans Peter Ring said during a presentation on the third-quarter results of Airbus parent company EADS. The abandoning of the program will allow Airbus to write back into its books a provision of 192 million euros ($261 million) it had made on the program. The A340 first flew in April 1992 and in 1993 it scored a record for the longest non-stop flight, between Paris and Auckland, New Zealand. The Boeing 777 launched two years later and had the same capacity but with only two engines it was more fuel-efficient. Airbus parent company EADS announced on Thursday a six-month delay in first deliveries of its A350 long-haul jetliner, designed to compete with Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, but raised its outlook for the year after third-quarter profits surged. Moreover, Airbus said Thursday it had begun selling aircraft in euros, a first for the industry, as the eurozone debt crisis has pinched dollar financing for jet purchases. “It has happened. We have several contracts with airlines in euros,” Peter Ring said during a presentation on the third-quarter results of Airbus parent company EADS. “The number is starting to become significant,” he added. Aircraft sales, long dominated by US companies, has traditionally been in dollars. Exchange rates have long been a concern for Airbus which has most of its production costs in euros and earnings in dollars. The eurozone debt crisis, however, has put a squeeze on the ability of European banks that have financed aircraft purchases to raise dollars. Meanwhile, Airbus parent EADS pushed back its A350 carbon-fiber jetliner by six months with a 200 million euro ($272 million) charge as it seeks to avoid errors like those that nearly derailed Europe's A380 superjumbo. The delay trimmed third-quarter profits that nonetheless beat expectations as Airbus stabilized costs on the troublesome superjumbo project. And EADS shares got a boost as Europe's largest aerospace group raised its outlook for the year. Despite storm waves in Western economies, Airbus and Boeing, who dominate the $70 billion aircraft market, are boosting output to meet demand from Asia and the Middle East. “I am confident the commercial aircraft market will sustain our growth in years to come despite the weakening of the macro-economic environment and particularly of the European economies,” Peter Ring told reporters. “Fifty percent of our backlog is in growing regions of the world and not in Europe or the US...so provided there isn't a big double-dip recession, we think it is manageable for us.”
