Last summer, while his airline was burning through more than $1.2 million an hour, Deutsche Lufthansa AG Chief Executive Carsten Spohr signed onto a video call to meet his counterpart at Airbus SE , the world’s biggest plane manufacturer.
At the top of Mr. Spohr’s agenda, according to people familiar with the conversation: He wanted a respite from the billions Lufthansa owed for aircraft it had ordered years before the pandemic.
Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said no.
Mr. Faury spent the bulk of the pandemic trying to force his biggest and most loyal customers, some of whom were teetering on the brink, to live up to their ironclad contractual obligations. That gamble, which bucked industry convention, has helped lift Airbus into the strongest competitive position in its history against rival Boeing Co.
Airbus’ sales teams went “plane by plane, airline by airline, customer by customer, to see what the backlog was, and what their contract with Airbus was,” said Mr. Faury, a former test-flight engineer who took the top job a year before Covid-19 struck. Ultimately, Lufthansa spent €1.3 billion ($1.5 billion) taking delivery of all but five of the 21 jets Mr. Spohr tried to defer, according to the company’s records.
