Punching through the hysteria about closing Boeing Wichita

Mike Mecham of Aviation Week has a thorough analysis of what’s behind the decision to close Boeing Wichita.

Contrast Mike’s story with this ridiculous analysis. It’s very, very rare that we call out someone else but this one is so far off the wall that we can’t help ourselves. (It should be noted Loren Thompson was paid by Boeing to do a report about the Airbus subsidies and the tanker competition.)

George Talbot of The Mobile Press-Register weighed in with this story.

Boeing envisions third parallel line for 737 Max

Here are the stories we did for FlightGlobal on Boeing’s hitting Rate 35 for the 737.

Boeing may assemble the re-engined 737 Max in the same facility as it builds the 737 NG family of aircraft in Renton, Washington.

Beverly Wyse, 737 programme vice-president and general manager, said a potential third line for the Max would be placed in Renton with the two existing lines by relocating engine, empennage and line work staging areas positioned between Line 1 and a mezzanine that runs the length of the building.

Commercial production at Renton is split between two lines in the 4-481 building. Line 1, the wider of the two lines, would likely play host to Line 3 for the 737 Max.

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Boeing celebrates going to “Rate 35” on 737

Boeing celebrated the transition to producing 35 737s per month, from 31.5, at a huge employee pep rally today (Jan. 10) at its Renton (WA) plant, where the assembly is done.

With the country-rock band Chance McKinney & Crosswire blasting away, the event was festooned with blue-and-white balloons, cupcakes with blue or white frosting, green T-shirts embossed with “Boeing 737 MAX” and a sometimes cheesy, scripted cheer-leading effect from employees, the event marked not only a milestone for the 737 but for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. No aircraft has been produced in such numbers by Boeing.

And more is to come. The production rate is to increase in 2013 to 38 per months and to 42 the following year.

Beverly Wyse, VP and GM of the 737 Program, told the 10,000 Renton employees that the rate could climb to 60 per month someday.

All this means more jobs for Renton and Puget Sound (the greater Seattle area). Renton will be adding 600-700 more jobs in the each of the next two years for the NG production rate increases, Wyse says. It is too early to know how many more jobs will come with a third line for MAX, which doesn’t have a first-flight time until 2016 and an entry-into-service in 4Q13.

Meanwhile, Boeing is processing through weekly orientation days 100-200 every Friday for Puget Sound employment, says Tommy Wilson, Business Relationship guru for IAM 751 at Renton.

We did two stories on the celebration for Flightglobal. Under our agreement with Flight, we have to wait 24 hours after Flight’s publication before we can post those here.

Separately, Aspire Aviation published this long piece, looking at the 787 program and ramp up.

Odds and Ends: Air India’s cost of 787s

Air India: FlightGlobal has this article that details the cost of Boeing’s 787s to Air India.

British Airways: Two pilots on a flight from London Heathrow nearly passed out

Kansas: Gov. Sam Brownback unveiled incentives today (Jan. 9) for Bombardier to bring jobs to Wichita, which politicians will view as very positive in the wake of Boeing’s decision to close its defense operations there. Considering Brownback’s stance on Boeing and the air force tanker competition, he continues to diversify Kansas from just Boeing. Wichita is the self-proclaimed “Air Capital of the World,” with presence from Bombardier, Hawker Beechcraft and Airbus. Boeing, of course, was the anchor, having been in Kansas 80 years.

More on tankers: Flightglobal has an interesting piece that 10 years ago, Embraer was prepared to join Airbus Military in the development of the A400M.

 

 

Fallout from Boeing’s Wichita move continues

Wichita (KS) politicians continue to grouse about the decision by Boeing to close the defense operations there and move jobs to Oklahoma City, San Antonio and Puget Sound (Seattle).

The Seattle Times has this article, quoting the Wichita mayor and other officials. The portion of the article that caught our eye is this:

“We thought we had a marriage,” said Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer, who until his 2007 election was a business manager at Spirit AeroSystems, the airplane-manufacturing operation sold off by Boeing two years earlier.

“It’s taken a lot of work for us to control our outrage,” he said. “So don’t ask me… are you outraged, because the answer will be yes, with probably another four-letter word attached to it.”

Kansas politicians feel particularly “angry and disappointed and dismayed,” as one county commissioner put it, because they led the Republican flank of the decadelong congressional push to secure the $35 billion Air Force tanker contract for Boeing.

In return they were told the company and its suppliers would generate 7,500 direct and indirect jobs after Boeing clinched the contract last February.

“We as a community demonstrated our loyalty to the Boeing Company when they asked us to stand behind them and to go fight for them,” Brewer said.

Now he’s singing a different tune. “Don’t think for one second that we are not exploring our opportunities to go out and recruit Airbus… We are making those phone calls.”

Well, that’s going to be a tough sell. During the tanker competition, Kansas politicians, notably then-Sen. Sam Brownback (now governor) and ex-Congressman Todd Tiahrt (a former Boeing employee as well) couldn’t say enough bad things about Airbus is their campaign for Boeing’s tanker. Tiahrt was particularly vitriolic, though Brownback was no shrinking violet, either.

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Odds and Ends: Bombardier, Boeing and Mountain Dew

Bombardier: Jon Ostrower reports that Bombardier will deliver 10 CSeries per month from 2016 in this report. This is a pretty modest rampy up rate, in our view, on the way to a projected maximum of 20 per month. Ostrower also has this piece about the activation of BBD’s CIASTA “iron bird” designed to test systems on the ground, well before the first flight, in a bid to iron out any problems before getting too far into assembly.

Even at the maximum rate, this pales compared with the 42 per month announced by Boeing for the 737 and 44 per month announced by Airbus for the A320. Both companies are considering even higher rates, to as many as 60 per month.

This also is one reason why BBD isn’t striving for some mega-order that some observers and analysts want as indicative a vast market acceptance of the CSeries. BBD simply couldn’t fill such an order without one customer dominating its production line. BBD wants to establish a broad customer base by entry-into-service.

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C919 gains but loses advantages

Here is an article we did for FlightGlobal Pro.

After a slow and disappointing start compared with expectations that had been set in advance of the Zhuhai Air Show in November 2010, Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China’s (Comac) C919 has picked up steam.

Prior to Zhuhai, Chinese authorities forecast “hundreds” of orders would be announced for China’s first indigenously built mainline jet since the reverse-engineered Boeing 707 copy that never entered commercial service. Instead, a disappointing 55 firm orders and 50 options were announced.

Since then, there are about 250 orders and options now on the books. According to Flightglobal’s Ascend Online database, 160 of these are firm orders from nine Chinese customers, including four lessors. China’s “big three” airlines, Air China, China Eastern and China Southern, ordered a disappointing five aircraft each. Hainan ordered 20. Some of the announced orders have yet to be firmed up as contracts.

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PNAA conference in Seattle Feb. 6-8

The Pacific Northwest Aerospace Alliance is hosting two conferences in the Seattle area in February and March.

PNAA’s 11th annual conference is Feb. 6-7-8 at the Lynnwood (WA) Convention Center, north of Seattle and south of Everett. Information may be found here. This 2 1/2 day conference is comprised of a Defense Focus Day on the afternoon of Feb. 6; a day-and-a-half of commercial aviation presentations and a Suppliers’ Fair on the afternoon of the 8th.

Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier, CFM, Pratt & Whitney, the Teal Group’s Richard Aboulafia, G2 Global Solutions’ Michel Merluzeau, Alcoa and Electroimpact are among the presenters on the commercial side.

Tayloe Washburn of Project Pegasus and the Washington Aerospace Partnership will discuss the issues surrounding the assembly site of the 737 MAX.

Boeing’s Insitu  EADS North America and Lockheed Martin are among the defense industry presenters.

More than 300 people attended the 2011 conference, which is now the largest in the Pacific Northwest and one of the largest on the West Coast. PNAA serves Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alberta and British Columbia. It has arranged trade missions from Europe, Asia and Latin America visiting here to meet with Washington State suppliers. PNAA was also asked by the White House and the US Commerce Department to arrange a meeting of key CEOs in Seattle to discuss economic issues affecting aerospace.

The March event PNAA is organizing is a Suppliers Forecasting Symposium. This one day event on March 12 precedes the first USA-based Aerospace & Defense Supplier Summit organized by BCI Aerospace.

The Symposium is the first of its kind: a day-long event focused on forecasting the requirements in the supply chain that services Boeing, other OEMs and the Tier 1 suppliers. Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Boeing Defense, Space & Security will be presenters as well as two noted aerospace analysts from Wall Street, David Strauss of UBS and Robert Spingarn of Credit Suisse. They follow Boeing and the supply chain and have their views on forecasting the needs of the suppliers.

These are two important events sponsored by PNAA and the A&DSS summit by BCI Aerospace is equally important to the Washington aerospace supply chain. PNAA members get a discount to the A&DSS event.

Caution flags waving as we enter 2012

As 2012 opens, we are concerned about the increasing signs global cargo traffic is softening.

Cargo traffic is typically a leading indicator of passenger traffic, both on the decline and subsequent rise. Cargo traffic fell 25% globally at the start of the Great Recession and passenger traffic soon followed. Cargo traffic began to recover before passenger traffic as the world edged out of recession.

But now, there are several indicators cargo traffic is softening again. IATA figures show traffic is on the decline. Additionally, there have been several developments at individual airlines.

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Our choice for momentous event: IAM-Boeing contract

Note: Highs and Lows for 2011: see AirInsight.

In our previous post, we gave readers a choice of the most momentous event for 2011 for Airbus and Boeing; and who was the most influential person for the year and what would be the predictive momentous event for 2012.

We agree with three of the four readers’ choice but disagree for the momentous vote for Boeing. We think it was the IAM-Boeing contract agreed to nearly a year ahead of the amendable date of September 2012. This agreement extended a new contract for four years and is heralding a new era of cooperation between the union and the company.

Here’s why we think this agreement beats out the 787, the readers’ choice, as Boeing’s most momentous event in 2011.

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