Actualitate

If it's not Boeing, I'm not going.

Airbus is essentially a political organization that incidentally builds airplanes. Many of its decisions are heavily influenced or completely made by political considerations (the need to build a plant in a certain country, etc.). It plays an eternal game of catch-up with Boeing, trying to come up with gadgets that will make it seem ahead of the game.

Boeing is a for-profit corporation that makes its money by building airplanes that businesses and governments want to buy. It concentrates on building good airplanes because that's what customers will buy, and political considerations usually take a distant back seat to this motivation. It is not owned by the government and does not receive constant government handouts to stay afloat, and its officers are not appointed by the government as sinecures for persons in political favor. It cannot legally bribe foreign governments or persons to obtain overseas business, so it has to build better airplanes. The wings of its aircraft do not snap off below the design tolerances.

Airbus has a philosophy that says that the engineers who designed the airplane are the masters, and the pilots are mere attendants. If the pilot wants to do something that the engineers don't want done, the computers aboard an Airbus will ignore the pilot's commands. The aircraft also has many different "laws" (an interesting choice of words) that govern its behavior, and pilots must learn all of these, since the aircraft may not do the same thing in response to the same command when operating under different laws.

Boeing has a philosophy that says that the pilot is master and commander, and whatever he says goes, as he is ultimately responsible for the safety of the flight. If a pilot asks a Boeing to do something that the engineers didn't design it to do, the aircraft will warn the pilot, but it will still obey, and it will generally always obey in the same way.

Boeing is conservative, worrying first about safety and second about flash and glitter. Airbus is the opposite. I prefer safety over flash.

Thus, I prefer Boeing.