New Fly Zone

The biannual air show at Le Bourget outside Paris is always an occasion for commercial trash-talking between competitors, and last week was hardly an exception. But this time there was more than the obligatory posturing of the two big commercial aircraft makers, Boeing and Airbus, over who could land more orders and whose subsidies are bigger. As the week passed, the fuzzy boundary between the commercial and the downright political was breached with ever-deepening vigor.

It began when Boeing vice chairman Harry Stonecipher wrong-footed the opposition before the show by speculating in Le Monde that the European Commission's...