The senior sales executive at Airbus raised doubts on Monday over its order forecast for 2009, but insisted aviation would recover from its slump in an economy still hooked on air travel.
Airbus, the world's largest producer of commercial airliners, is targeting 300-400 gross orders before cancellations in 2009. So far, it has booked only 30.
Commercial Director John Leahy told reporters he still hoped to achieve the company's sales target but conceded the current pace of orders suggested he would fall short.
"I don't think it will be less than a hundred, but if you had to bet today, you would probably bet on fewer than 300," he told a press briefing at the company's Toulouse headquarters.
Leahy said he expected aircraft deliveries to remain broadly flat during the downturn -- the fourth and widely seen as the most testing in as many decades as airlines struggle to fill seats and seek scarce finance to pay for jets they have ordered.
Leahy said Airbus could afford to lose up to 12-13 percent of its backlog of 3,600 jets sold because of the size of the order book.
Airbus last week announced plans to cut output of its A380 superjumbo output alongside cuts in production of smaller aircraft. But it has so far kept a 2009 goal of equalling last year's record 483 deliveries.
Parent EADS is due to release first-quarter earnings on Tuesday and may give an update on its 2009 outlook, which foresees "roughly stable" sales based on 483 deliveries.
Airbus delivered 116 aircraft in the first quarter compared with 123 in the first three months of last year.
By cutting production, Airbus is responding to worries that airlines may be unable to afford final payments in time for delivery -- leaving the planemaker with unsold and unpainted planes on the tarmac known to the industry as "white tails".
Airbus last year shelved plans to increase single-aisle production to 40 from 36 planes a month and in February said it would cut monthly production of that family to 34 from October.
Leahy predicted 2011 would be a year of recovery and that Airbus could restore its 40-a-month goal by end-2010 or 2011.
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Leahy's predictions contrasted with other less optimistic forecasts from industry figures.
The head of one of Airbus's largest customers, lessor International Leased Finance Corporation, said in March that Airbus and Boeing may have to scale back production by 25-30 percent by mid-2010.
ILFC is in the process of being sold by AIG, the troubled US insurer, and Leahy said it had had two bids.
Leahy said he was not concerned about the stability of ILFC, which is the backbone of many airline fleets because, if the sale plans fell through, it would remain part of federally-controlled AIG.
He sought to defuse concerns about the finances of major customers such as Emirates, Qatar Airways and Etihad in the wake of the collapse of property prices in the Gulf region.
However he said a lot of freight carriers were in "serious trouble" after months of historically weak cargo traffic that economists have blamed on shortages of trade financing.
Leahy said he was confident airline passenger traffic would continue to double every 15 years, propelled by a rule of thumb that states air traffic grows twice as fast as the economy.
"Air traffic and world economic growth are so intertwined that you can't have one without the other," Leahy said.
He dismissed grim forecasts from airlines body IATA, saying they underplayed the impact of low-cost airlines and ignored domestic travel.
IATA says passenger numbers dropped 11 percent in March and it predicts USD$4.7 billion in industry losses this year.
Leahy said Airbus saw some early signs that business confidence and trends in air traffic were beginning to recover.
In the worst case, Airbus sees worldwide passenger traffic falling 4 percent this year and flattening in 2010. In the best case, traffic would drop 2 percent this year and rise 4 percent next year, with 2011 growth over 6 percent in either scenario.
