Next-gen aircraft have airlines thinking about new strategies for inventory availability.

A320 C check volumes are set to rise with the burgeoning fleet.

Jim McNerney smiled broadly as he bounded onto a podium in a historic hangar at Reagan Washington National Airport this month, a gleaming Boeing 787 serving as a dramatic backdrop just beyond the open hangar door. The chairman and CEO of Boeing was accepting the 2011 Robert J. Collier Trophy on behalf of the team that developed the 787, a jet that is finally in service following more than three years of delays.

If there is an upside to the A380's wing-component cracking saga, it may be that it should enable Airbus to avoid an embarrassing misstep on its next big development program, the A350.

Here is one simple lesson to be gleaned from Aviation Week's Top-Performing Companies (TPC Study): avoid overconfidence. History shows that a first-place finish is no guarantee of long-term success. Conversely, even consistently strong performers have a bad year every now and then.

Plagued with massive losses, Finnair is becoming the first European airline to outsource a significant part of its short-haul network. But SAS Scandinavian Airlines, its main rival in the Nordic region, is learning the hard way what can happen when regional partner airlines become unreliable as it too seeks its own financial turnaround.

The order backlog for Airbus and Boeing is now more than 8,000 units and worth about a half-trillion dollars. Their factories will be busy to the end of the decade, smoothing the impact of any order retrenchments that some industry trackers expect in the middle of the decade.