Without looking it up, can you pronounce “Embraer”? More to the point, have you ever knowingly been on one of the Brazilian manufacturer’s aeroplanes? Answering no to either or both of these questions isn’t unusual. But it is telling.
A generation has gone by since Jim O’Neill minted the term Brics. Twice as long has passed since Deng Xiaoping opened the door of China. The subsequent trickle of economic and political power from the north Atlantic has been the background noise of my lifetime. I nag people to visit Dubai because nowhere else brings home quite so unignorably the south-eastward drift of the world.
And still, after all this, civil aviation is such an Airbus-Boeing duopoly, such a Euro-American lock, that even prolific flyers have just the vaguest sense of the third force in that sector. (Turns out I’ve been saying Embraer with one syllable too few all this time.)