Striking French air traffic controllers should be back at work this weekend to guide squadrons of aerospace executives into Paris for the French capital's biennial industry bash. It's the biggest week of the year for most of them and, amid all the razzmatazz, deals worth billions of dollars will be done. A chunk of that will find its way to UK suppliers embedded on all the major aircraft programmes, underpinning growth for our hangar of home-grown engineers.
Analysts at Deutsche Bank are so excited by it all that they've put together a 125-page guide to the show, and had a stab at predicting the outcome. "Driven by the ongoing high level of capital availability and low interest rates, we expect good order flow to emerge," they say. Firm order announcements for both Airbus and Boeing (NYSE: BA) could reach 250-300 planes, predicts Deutsche. And it will be a better balanced event this time, both between the big two manufacturers and wide-body and narrow-body jets.
It could be, but Randy Tinseth, Boeing's vice president of marketing for commercial planes, is already playing mind games. "Our competition always puts on a show for the home fans by rolling out a wave of orders - and we don't expect that to change this year," says Mr Tinseth. And he has a point. Despite having split the market over the past decade, Airbus has outsold Boeing by two-to-one in air show weeks, more when it's in Paris.
But the Americans see this as "one week out of 52" and have used the event to flag an upgrade to industry demand forecasts for the next 20 years. They say the world fleet will double and more than 35,000 new planes worth almost $5trn (£3.2trn) will be needed, driven mostly by single aisle jets in the Far East. Airbus itself has just raised guidance for its gross orders in 2013 by 100 to "comfortably above 800 aircraft". Over 500 are already in the bag (the same as Boeing), taking their commercial jet backlog nearer to 5,000.
Flying the new high-tech A350, rival to Boeing's 787 and revamped 777, over Le Bourget airport is unlikely, but a maiden flight pencilled in for 14 June would be a shot in the arm for Airbus. Away from order speculation, Deutsche tells investors to look out for the possible launch of Boeing's longer 787-10, intense marketing of the 777X, vital orders for the A380 superjumbo and comment on second-half recovery in valuable aftermarket work.
