Airbus A350 future developments

That reminds me, I was talking to someone from Rolls Royce at the SG Airshow and on the subject of future growth of the TrentXWB he said (something along the lines of); If Airbus or Boeing wanted a larger engine we could probably push the -97 around 5% [1.05 x 97 = 101.85], anymore and we'd offer a new engine.

One a side note, he also said they'll probably do a 'glory run' of the engine and run it up to 120 pounds of thrust to see how much thrust the engine could actually produce but at those thrust levels, the engine would not be economical to run.

Airbus has the advantage of talking to airlines. They are not doing any guess-work, they will not launch a project if they cannot see a sizable market.

Airbus had planned to keep costs low enough for the programme to break even after about 250 deliveries (freighters included). They are almost there, even without the freighter version, but a flawed execution caused costs to surge, delayed the programme and wreaked havoc with the plans.

When the aircraft actually became available to customers, the market had changed : the 2008 economic crisis and the following downturn made customers risk-adverse, growth anticipations were reduced, more and more airlines successfully introduced very dense configurations (10-abreast 777s) instead of VLAs. The only saving grace came from an unexpected major customer, EK.

The bottom line is that introducing an entirely new aircraft size, designed to address a new market segment during the next thirty years, is a much more risky undertaking than making a simple stretch of an existing type.

Yes, the XWB-97 engine has some margin built in. However, a higher trust will also result in a slightly larger fuel consumption.