The aircraft manufacturing industry as far as airliners are concerned—we'll leave aside the military side—is a mature industry. The idea that you can have massive increases or decreases in fuel consumption is difficult. If it were a new industry, no. If you look at an airliner of 1960, such as a DC-8, and look at an Airbus A380, and move them a certain distance and remove the painting, they haven't changed a whole lot.
An engineer will tell you that the engines are far more fuel-efficient, the electronics are light years ahead, and so are the aerodynamics, but it's a very conservative industry in certain senses. As far as the future is concerned, what could really help won't be anything massive. It's the idea of small items—a per cent here, half a per cent there, and a sort of tweak here—making sure that the improvement in efficiency doesn't double the cost of the airplane, because the whole thing has to be taken into consideration.
It's incrementalism. They're trying to improve the aircraft and keep them easy to maintain.
Some of the larger assistance as far as fuel efficiency is concerned, for example.... That's the sort of thing that will take awhile, in some cases a very long while, and it would prove very expensive. They have types of engines that have been.... There's nothing new under the sun. Many of the ideas we think of as novelties today, they were thinking about 25 years ago.