Manufacturers of large transports for the world's airlines have been selling so many airplanes lately that talk of future developments and programs has been all but drowned out by record sales figures.

At this writing the big three, Airbus Industrie, Boeing Commercial Airplanes and McDonnell Douglas, were sitting on backlogs of more than 2,000 orders, an all-time high. This does not even include the substantial orders received by Fokker and British Aerospace for their 100-seat Fokker 100 and BAe 146 jet transports.

Most proposed new programs are largely niche-fillers, with Fokker considering a stretch of its Fokker 100 to 130 seats, Boeing considering plugging its productline gap with a once-again revised stretch of the 767 and McDonnell Douglas considering a challenge to Boeing's historically untouchable 747 niche with a Super Stretch MD-11. The potentially revolutionary MD-90s with General Electric Unducted Fans won't be truly revolutionary until fuel prices rise, remaining until that time simply updated MD-80s.

Boeing, of course, has been setting most of the sales records in recent months. As of mid-September Boeing had sold 478 of its jet transports so far this year with the value of the orders estimated at $21.5 billion. Boeing's all-time record for an entire year was 461 orders set in 1978.

The surge of orders at Boeing this year has been spurred largely by a boom in U.S. airline sales. Of the $20.6 billion in 1988 sales just before Farnborough, $9.6 billion came for U.S. airlines, an all-time high. This more than doubles the dollar value of Boeing's U.S. sales for all of 1987. Previous high for U.S. sales was $8.6 billion in 1985, the only year in which Boeing sold more to U.S. carriers than non-U.S. since 1978.

The record year in sales is creating all-time record backlogs. Boeing alone enjoyed a backlog of 1,034 transports by mid-September. This does not include the de Havilland part of the company, which holds orders for 81 of its Dash 8-100 twin turboprop transports and 29 of its stretched Dash 8-300 models. These swell the Boeing backlog to 1,144. Boeing's previous all-time high order backlog was only 760 transports in 1987, recorded at the end of the year, and not including de Havilland.

Capacity needs

Reasons for the sales boom are numerous, but the chief one appears to be an airline need for more capacity to satisfy the current and expected traffic growth, In addition, airlines are enjoying some of their best financial years, always a boon to airplane sales. Lesser reasons are the advancing ages of airline fleets around the world, the age of the average airline transport now at 11 years.

Airlines are also still interested in improving their efficiency, and there is no question that the new models are more efficient than the old. They nearly all have just two engines, are much more fuel efficient and quieter than the older turbojets and turbofans, and the new transports nearly all have room for only two crew members up front. If there is...