What Airbus really did was to give European aviation a choice: Toughen up or die. "Airbus put us under intense pressure," says an executive whose European company supplies both Airbus and Boeing. "They wanted more than the Americans, and they still do. They demanded cost cuts that went from 10 to 40 percent from their suppliers -- even 80 percent." He adds: "It nearly killed us, but it made us stronger. Everyone who works with Airbus is proud of it, because the result is continual improvement."

Boeing has just one remaining asset Airbus can't top -- the B747, the humpbacked jumbo jet that inaugurated the era of mass air travel in 1969; it remains the most profitable airliner the industry has ever seen. "In the 1990s, the B747-400 sold at $160 million. One-third of that was profit, and the production rate at one point was up to six a month," notes aerospace analyst Nick Cunningham of Salomon Smith Barney in London. When was the last time any company in your stock portfolio made $300 million in profit per month on just one product?

Those days are over. So far this year, Boeing has sold only six B747s. But Airbus appears unwilling to wait for the jumbo to die a natural death. It wants to kill it itself. Its goal for the A3XX, says Cunningham, is "to do the final project -- to cap Boeing so Boeing never again owns the high ground, as they did with the B747."

Ironically, Airbus doesn't really need the A3XX to beat Boeing because it already has. Since 1999 Europeans have sold more airliners than Americans. It has taken a while for this fact to sink in. Last year as I sat in Brown's office, he swore that without the A3XX, Airbus would never "kill Boeing's cash cow, this monopolistic B747 that throws off so much cash that they can use it to start other programs and subsidize other airplanes." Nor, he added, could Airbus ever take half the airliner market from the Americans. Then he paused, and said amazedly: "Both those objectives have been achieved. Talk about an ingrained underdog mentality."

Now, as the A3XX launch countdown accelerates, companies and cities across the European Union are fighting bare-knuckled for their cut of A3XX contracts. On the banks of the Elbe, civic boosters have erected mockups of cargo crates labeled "A3XX." Inside assembly plants in Toulouse and Hamburg, visitors are shown green-primed Airbus fuselages like hollowed-out Sequoias, their cabins lined with jungle weaves of cables, tubes and insulation. The message is that no one could build an A3XX better than the fine folks on this very (French or German) factory floor.

Meanwhile, with every day that goes by, the A3XX gets more expensive to build. One reason, says Jarry, is that airlines want no less than six versions of the plane, each offering variations in passenger capacity, freight load or range. "The Japanese, for example," he says, "want a short-range plane. The first, second and fourth air routes in the world are Japanese short-range routes." Airbus figures that just 20 airlines will buy 75 percent of all the A3XXs ever sold, so it makes sense to build them to order. But given the chance -- and the launch of a new airliner is the best they'll ever get -- airlines always demand the maximum number of options on their planes. According to former United Airlines CEO Gerald Greenwald, that makes airliners 20 percent more expensive to build than they should be. For an A3XX, the difference amounts to more than $45 million per airplane.

Numbers like that are scaring the bureaucrats who lend Airbus its development funds. When I told Jarry that the wonks at the Ministry of Finances on the Quai de Bercy in Paris, known to the French as "Bercy," calculate that the world market for the A3XX will be no more than 450 planes, he got angry. "What's the good of having computers if you don't have common sense?" he snapped. "I think our planes are going to sell by the thousands. Tell that to Bercy." Airbus is built on faith, and so far its faith has worked miracles.

As for Boeing, it's finally taking Airbus and the A3XX more seriously. Last year Boeing spokeswoman Susan Davis told me flatly, "There is no market for a plane larger than the B747-400." If so, then her president, Phil Condit, has stopped reading his own company's marketing studies. He has begun pushing Airbus' customers to buy the future B747-X, a remodeled, bigger version of Old Jumbo.

No one knows for sure what will happen in commercial aviation between now and 2020. But one thing is certain: The skies are about to become a lot less friendly.

Sign up to receive free e-mail updates from Salon -- now in 17 different varieties!