In the “jumbo” aircraft market Boeing and Airbus are locked in their usual battle, but their approaches are radically different, with one manufacturer adopting a revolutionary design and the other a more evolutionary approach.

Airbus will deliver the first of its A380 superjumbos to Singapore Airlines in September after spending an estimated $18 billion (£9.2 billion) developing a revolutionary double-decker, 550-seat aircraft. Boeing, by comparison, will introduce a modest, stretched version of its existing 747, called the -8.

This new model will seat 467 passengers, 51 more than the jumbos flying today, and cost about $50 million less than the $300 million A380.

Airbus’s offering is a far bolder and more ambitious project, but the European manufacturer’s revolution has turned bloody. The company has been overwhelmed by the complexity of building the A380: the aircraft is two years behind schedule and costing Airbus billions of dollars.

Airbus will now have to sell 420 aircraft worth $126 billion at list prices for the project to break even. This looks a daunting task as A380 sales have stalled at 156 despite being on sale for seven years.

Boeing’s 747-8 has 87 orders in 18 months, and the American company acknowledged last week that it was in talks with a dozen more airlines, including British Airways, to sell the new aircraft. Boeing has made a number of significant changes to the 747, including a new wing and stretching the fuselage by about 18 feet. New engines, provided by General Electric, will make the -8 about 16 per cent more fuel efficient than its predecessors.

However, compared with the work Boeing has done on the 787 Dreamliner, the 747-8 lacks ambition. It has not adopted a carbon-fibre fuselage, fly-by-wire controls and has found little to do with a new upper-deck cabin space created at the back of the aircraft. The difficulty of building a jet, particularly one the size of a jumbo, cannot be underestimated, but compared with Airbus’s A380 and Boeing’s own 787, the new 747-8 is a relatively small step on the evolutionary ladder.

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