The current airliners represent the culmination of aeronautical technology [1–7] developed over a century [8, 9], and the airline market [10–13] has become the biggest sector of aviation. The following account covers the airliner market from the dawn of the jet age to the present time and considers also future prospects. The focus is on subsonic airliners since supersonic flight was a major technological success [14–16] without the expected commercial impact, and the current situation is a duopoly between an incumbent Boeing with a long history [17] and a challenger Airbus with proven technical prowess, inherited from its constituent companies.