The stakes could not be higher as the commercial aerospace industry struggles to define the new rules of the road that will govern industrial and trade relations in the post-Airbus-Boeing-duopoly.

One of the challenges for executives is figuring out how to operate with new partners while still protecting core customer relationships and technical competencies. There is a very real prospect that the “coopetition” model—in which competitors on one program cooperate on another—that has already taken hold in the defense marketplace will migrate into the commercial world.

EADS has been among the most vocal in suggesting that entrenched players such as Airbus and Boeing need to look at the likes of Embraer, Bombardier, Comac, Mitsubishi and others as potential partners. “In the future, we will have to talk to some of [them],” says EADS CEO Louis Gallois.

In May, he indicated an interest in working with Embraer, but EADS’s head of strategy, Marwan Lahoud, says that is not the only place the company is looking. “I’m a bit worried when we are focusing only on one,” he says. “We are having talks with everybody.”

Lahoud sees a clear imperative for partnering in the new, multilateral aerospace world order. “The stakes are so high that we have to optimize the system,” he says.

Embraer CEO Frederico Fleury Curado says “there is potential” for such undertakings, but he also warns it will not be easy. While he says he is “flattered” by the attention of others, Curado stresses that “we want to be owners of our own destiny.” That means Embraer would not just be a risk-sharing partner on a project the way engine makers are now on airliners. “We don’t want to relinquish our access to our customers,” Curado says. If that were the price, he insists, “I’d prefer to stay smaller.”

The emerging multi-company playing field may also usher in a period of great turbulence, supplanting two decades of relative stability in the aircraft-building sector. “I’m not sure the world can sustain all the new initiatives. In my view, [consolidation] is inevitable,” says Boeing CEO Jim McNerney. But he cautions that such moves will only happen in the medium to longer term; for now, the new players will remain firmly focused on pursuing their own plans.

The view that the market may realign naturally is shared by Jim Albaugh, president of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, who notes that “if you look at history, we’ve never really had more than three, three and a half suppliers at one time. I think that with the cost of investment in developing new airplanes, you need to have at least a 30% market share to be able to survive.” But even though he says “right now, we don’t have any intention of doing a tie-up with anyone else,” he acknowledges there is a lot of talking going on in the industry.

Moreover, Curado points out that the industrial reshuffling will require a galvanizing event, such as the launch of a new product.

He believes the dominant aircraft makers should also be attentive to something else right now—the unbridled ambitions of China’s aerospace industry. “The real threat is China,” he says, which is looking to take advantage of free-trade markets but is locking up its own.