Plane makers hope for new deals at Paris Air Show

Airbus was the big winner on the first day of the week-long show on Monday, announcing a 1.9-billion-dollar order from Qatar Airways for 24 medium-haul A320 planes, while Boeing did not receive any new orders.

Airbus, a consortium of the French, British, Spanish and German aircraft industries, got a boost Monday when, in addition to the Qatar order, Vietnam Airlines said it was planning to buy two long-haul Airbus A350 jets and 16 medium-haul A321s.

The catalogue price for the jets is 1.9 billion dollars (1.4 billion euros).

In other news Monday, Russian-controlled Hungarian airline Malev announced plans to buy 30 Sukhoi Superjet 100 planes as the Russian aircraft maker predicted it would have 150 orders for the new jet by the end of 2009.

Sukhoi chief Mikhail Pogosian said he was aiming for 20 percent of the global market in regional passenger planes and that the new jet would get its certification in Russia in November and in the European Union during 2010.

The Superjet 100 is marketed as cheaper than its rivals, Brazil's Embraer and Canada's Bombardier, with a catalogue price of 28 million dollars (20 million euros).

The chief executive of Boeing’s commercial jet division on Monday sought to dispel some of the pessimism at this year’s Paris Air Show, arguing that the global economy was showing signs of a recovery and predicting a resumption of growth in airline traffic as early as 2010.

"It feels to me that we may have reached the bottom," Scott Carson, head of commercial airline business at US jetmaker Boeing, told reporters at the show.

"There is no certainty but it does feel to us that there are reasons to hope that the recovery will begin next year," he added.