None of the aircraft orders announced at the Paris Air Show this week have been relevant to Australian travellers and their airlines until today, when AirAsia announced it was buying 200 Airbus A320NEOs, powered by the Franco-American CFM new technology Leap-X engine.

AirAsia is the most successful low cost low fare carrier in Asia. In January 2009 with much hoop-la a ‘strategic alliance’ between AirAsia and Jetstar was announced, and almost immediately vanished into never-again-mentioned obscurity.

One of the benefits of the alliance was to be cooperation in making joint submissions to Airbus and Boeing to influence the replacement single aisle jet designs both makers were then talking up, given that the combined needs of AirAsia and Jetstar would be for at least 300 of the new airliners.

However AirAsia has made up it mind, and while Boeing doesn’t appear to know what it is going to do about an all new 737 replacement, Airbus decided to refine the A320 family with new generation engine technology, and various other tweaks, including large winglets.

Provided the Leap-X engined NEO taken by AirAsia meets specifications, it will burn 15 per cent less fuel per comparable flight than current A320s, and fly further or carry more cargo below decks.

This would give AirAsia a significant additional cost advantage over its main LCC rivals, Jetstar Asia and Tiger Airways, who both use current versions of the A320 family.

Will Jetstar follow with an NEO order? It seems inevitable, but if the address given by Qantas CEO Alan Joyce yesterday is a guide on this, the emphasis on carefully managing Qantas group capital expenditure suggests it might not happen very soon.

While low cost carrier order books often seem fanciful at first glance, they don’t keep their jets very long, preferring to replace them while young and before they begin to require more costly maintenance procedures.  Thus while AirAsia now has 375 A320s of various types on order, and only 89 in service, it may only have 200 of them in service by the time it has taken delivery of all of them, having traded the balance or returned them to leasing companies.

The torrent of orders for A320NEOs this week puts more pressure on Boeing to do something. Closer to home to Boeing, Bloomberg earlier today reported that American Airlines was considering ordering 100 A320NEOs too. That sounded like an attempt to bluff Boeing into action, but on the other hand, if Boeing holds off in favor of its preferred option of introducing an all new jet in the single aisle 180-220 seat market from 2019 on, it may not have nearly as many customers in this sector as it has now.

Unlike the A320 family, the 737 series sits too close to the ground to fit the wider diameter of the Leap-X engine or the other new tech engine offering in the form of a ducted geared turbo fan design from Pratt & Whitney.

Australia’s two big 737 operators, Virgin Australia and Qantas, will be no doubt, thinking about their single aisle renewal options as Airbus racks up orders that will, at this rate, leave it with no production slots until the end of the decade anyhow.