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PARIS (Reuters) - Aerospace firms sought to contain a minefield of pressures on Thursday after an Airbus-led body urged the European Union to hit back against U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs and one of Europe's biggest airlines warned of higher fares.
Aircraft, engines, spare parts and components from landing gear to seats face higher costs and planning for the peak summer travel season could be disrupted as Brussels mulls a response, industry experts warned.
"It will be chaos. It creates massive demand uncertainty as airlines plan their network schedules," Rob Morris, global head of consultancy at UK-based Cirium Ascend, said.
Trump on Wednesday imposed sweeping tariffs on U.S. imports including 20% on EU goods and 10% on imports from Britain, home to engine maker Rolls-Royce.
The move went further than many investors and executives had expected, rattling a $150 billion-a-year jet industry that is an important contributor to the global economy.
Dominant planemakers Airbus, headquartered in France, and its U.S. rival Boeing have been a lightning rod for trade tensions for years, waging a subsidy dispute at the World Trade Organisation led by their governments for 17 years until a five-year truce was declared in 2021.
But with supply chains still not fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, insiders say both companies are reluctant to put fragile efforts to rebuild the industry at risk by fuelling a wider trade war.
France's aerospace industry has written to the European Commission calling for "proportionate and assertive" countermeasures if the new U.S. tariffs cause significant damage, a person familiar with the matter said.
But the appeal from the country's powerful Gifas aerospace lobby, whose rotating presidency is held by Airbus, also calls for any retaliation to be fine-tuned so as to avoid hurting European companies that rely heavily on U.S. imports.
Gifas did not respond to a request for comment. The European Commission referred to a statement by its president Ursula von der Leyen, who said the EU was prepared to respond with countermeasures if talks with Washington failed.
The tone of the letter - juggling retaliation with softening the impact on local importers - reflects France's position at the centre of an interlocking supply chain for jets and engines.
Analysts said it seemed aimed in part at tempering the impact of tariffs on the engine industry, which relies as much on transatlantic cooperation as the planemakers thrive on rivalry.
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Toulouse-based Airbus is France's second-biggest exporter after the agri-food sector and vies for sales with Boeing.