Airbus and Boeing supremacy secure despite turbulence [Video]

Boeing’s safety troubles and the Airbus scramble to ramp up production should have left a gap for smaller rivals to challenge their dominatiion of the commercial airliner market.

Yet the American and European giants face little near term threat to their lock on the medium and long-range aircraft markets, industry experts say, as the barriers to entry are too high for China’s COMAC or Brazil’s Embraer.

COMAC did not bother to bring its new C919, its first entry into the key single-aisle medium-range aircraft segment, to this week’s Farnborough airshow, Europe’s top aviation industry gathering.

Airbus and Boeing meanwhile added more than 260 planes to their massive order books of nearly 15,000 aircraft.

This despite the fact that an airline …