Over the past four years, a cabal of airline executives from around the world has regularly convened in the French countryside to decide if they want to change this picture. To do so, they will have to take one of the costliest gambles in the history of civil aviation. The price tag may be as high as $12 billion, but the payoff could be global dominance of the airline industry for the next half-century.

At the center of this bet is a new plane from Airbus Industrie -- the innocuously named A3XX, which happens to be the biggest passenger-carrying bird ever put in the sky -- a plane that makes the Boeing B747-400, currently the largest airliner flying, look like a runt.

In today's commercial airline industry, there are but two major players still in the game: the American Boeing and Airbus, a consortium of Continental aviation companies that has come to symbolize the new Europe. Both envision different solutions to the coming passenger crunch. The outcome will affect everything from bicontinental unemployment to the amount of sleep that people who live near airports get between takeoffs.

Boeing says the best way to fly us from here to 2015 is to double the number of jetliners in service, raising the present number to about 25,000. Though this could certainly work, imagine an air-traffic controller at a major airport during a peak summer vacation week, staring down at a wave of winged metal on the radar screen. Boeing's official response: "Airline schedulers and airports will work together to squeeze in more flights." Let's hope it's right.

Airbus says Boeing is wrong. "It seems to us absolutely inconceivable," says Adam Brown, the company's vice president for forecasting, "that the system can work without substantial numbers of airplanes larger than anything flying today."

Which brings us to the A3XX. At this writing, the final decision whether to build the flying Godzilla -- a decision once considered speculative -- has leapt nearly every obstacle. It could be days away.

If the A3XX is as successful as Airbus hopes (which remains to be seen), it is likely that the planes will dominate the industry for the next five decades -- and possibly much longer. Since a typical airliner has a 20-year production run and continues to fly for 30 years, the economic impact could be devastating. American prestige would also be seriously tarnished. Since the end of World War II, airliners have replaced battleships as emblems of national power. According to one aviation executive who works with both companies, "There's a strong identity link between Boeing and the U.S. -- between Boeing's force and American force."

For the past three years, many considered the A3XX to be a pipe dream. Since 1997, Airbus has been waiting for 30 of what it calls "public manifestations of interest" to launch production. Until last Friday, the count was stuck at 21, all slated for Emirates Airlines and Singapore Airlines.

On June 2, Airbus trumpeted the news that Air France was "interested" in buying 10 more A3XXs, with a fanfare usually reserved for firm orders. On Wednesday, the International Lease Finance Corp., the biggest buyer of airliners in the world, said it might take five. On Thursday, Virgin Atlantic added five to 10 planes to the total. It isn't certain that these "manifestations" will turn into orders, but an engine has certainly begun to rev.

A3XX is what aviation engineers call "a very large commercial transport," or VLCT for short. If it were a movie, it might be called "The Jet That Ate the Sky." This is how big the airplane is: The A3XX-200, the largest model that Airbus is flogging to airlines, will seat 965 people and will be just 40 feet shorter than a regulation football field. One A3XX-200 could replace two B747-400s.

A plane this large presents a few unprecedented challenges.

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