Leeham News and Analysis
There's more to real news than a news release.
Leeham News and Analysis
- Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 19. April 25, 2025
- How good is the C929? Part 2. April 24, 2025
- Boeing First Quarter Results Update: China is 10% of the backlog, with 500 in “Unidentified” April 24, 2025
- Boeing First Quarter Results: Tariffs, Return flights, $10.55bn asset sale April 23, 2025
- RTX Q1 2025 Earnings: GTF Talk Takes A Back Seat To Tariffs April 22, 2025
787 Line 2: Not in Seattle, says Exec Candidate
Production Line 2 of the Boeing 787 won’t be in Seattle, a candidate for King County Executive told the on-line newspaper, Crosscut Seattle.
King County is where Seattle is located and Boeing’s Commercial Airplane headquarters is in the county. The 787 is assembled across the county line in Snohomish County at the Everett plant, but the 737 line is in King County at Renton.
Fred Jarrett, one of five candidates running in August’s primary, is a Boeing manager and a state senator. Crosscut had this report on the 787:
On coming up with big state subsidies to make sure Boeing’s second 787 production line is built here: “The second line will be elsewhere, in Texas or the South. Boeing is just doing that to have more options. The real question is about future narrow body assembly.” Jarrett claims no inside knowledge, despite all his years at Boeing. But if this is true about the 787 Dreamliner, the state could save itself from undergoing a political maelstrom by pushing for massive tax incentives — just what is now gearing up in the Governor’s office and the Chamber of Commerce.
Off to the Paris Air Show
We will be attending the EADS Media Day June 13 and the Paris Air Show on Monday and Tuesday. Watch for our reports from each event.
Performance, delays will be factors in KC-X rebid
The US Air Force is gearing up to issue a new request for proposals, perhaps as early as July, for Round 3 of the KC-X aerial refueling tanker competition. Pentagon officials hope to award a contract by year end.
The contest is widely expected to be a rematch of the battle between the Northrop Grumman/EADS/Airbus KC-30 and the Boeing KC-767AT. Although nobody knows what specifications will be in the RFP, the belief is that it will largely reflect the technical requirements of those in the Round Two RFP won by Northrop.
Boeing successfully protested the award, saying the USAF gave extra credit to the larger KC-30 while telling Boeing that it would not—thus prompting Boeing to stick with its KC-767 proposal. Boeing hinted that had it known of the USAF preference for a larger airplane, it might have offered a tanker based on the 777-200F.
Podcast details AF ACARS messages
There has been plenty of press about the 24 messages from the Air France flight that crashed. Addison Schonland of Innovation Analysis Group has two podcasts (17 minutes and 30 minutes) that has an expert decipher the messages. The podcasts may be found here. The PDF that is being deciphered is here.
A380 vs 747-8
Update, June 12: Boeing’s new 20 year forecast issued immediately before the Paris Air Show now forecasts just 740 VLAs, a dramatic drop from 960+ in its previous forecast. You can bet we’ll ask Airbus about this–and just guess what its answer will be.
Air Transport Intelligence, covering a United Airlines presentation at an investors conference, reports the carrier isn’t interested in the 747-8I:
“We’re focused on a new technology aircraft to materially improve cost performance,” said United senior vice president corporate planning and strategy Greg Taylor today during the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch transportation conference. The 747-8 is “not on the top of our list”, he adds.
United has specified to each manufacturer the aircraft it is most interested in, and Taylor explains the carrier has “left the door open for creativity”.
Original Post:
This is the last of our continuing reports from the Airbus Innovation Days….
Airbus continues to have production and delivery issues with the A380 and now, with the global economy and premium traffic doing so poorly, there have been additional deferrals and YTD no new orders for the giant airplane.
But Airbus still believes in the aircraft and continues to hold to its belief that to 2026, there will be a need for 1,280 Very Large Aircraft (VLA) in the passenger category. Airbus forecasts the need for at least 300 more VLA freighters.
United for 150 orders?
Update, June 5:
Here are a couple of news articles about this story:
Here is a 19-minute podcast on this story by Addison Schonland, Ernie Arvai, Erkan Pinar and us.
Original Post:
Be still my heart.
United Airlines requested RFPs from Airbus and Boeing for 150 airplanes, a mix of wide- and -narrow-body orders, including replacements for 97 Boeing 757s.
Why “be still my heart?” Because CEO Glenn Tilton has previously shown zero inclination to invest in United, preferring to shop the airline for a merger. United previously announced that long-standing orders for Airbus A320s would be canceled, forfeiting tens of millions in deposits–though we don’t believe these actually were canceled, not having shown up this way on the Airbus orders tally.
A330 in missing Air France flight
Update, June 2: Here is an interesting piece from the London Daily Mail with graphics of the timeline. The lightning strike was nearly an hour before the electronic signals alerting Air France to a power failure. The news reports yesterday made it sound like these were simultaneous events.
Original post:
An Airbus A330-200 is involved in the missing Air France flight that has surpassed fuel exhaustion time.
The airplane reported an electrical problem in proximity to a storm with heavy turbulence.
The A330 up to now had a perfect safety record with passengers on board (there was a fatal crash involving a test flight carrying only pilots and engineers). But there were recent incidents with Qantas Airways in which it was believed electronic signals from a nearby military installations interfered with electronic systems. In one instance, the plane lost altitude at a rapid rate.
Top on the list of investigative points will be (in no particular order) whether the electrical problem magnified to cause loss of control; whether the storm caused an “upset” and loss of control; whether the storm may have caused turbulence severe enough to prompt a structural failure; and whether a bomb or other terrorist act may have been involved.
The plane was 3-3 1/2 hours into the flight when the problems were reported and said to be near an island. There was no immediate indication whether the island had a landing strip.
Eco-Aviation Conference Report
The Air Transport World-Leeham Co. Eco-Aviation Conference last week produced a great deal of news, most notably the test results from Air New Zealand on its biofuel test flight made in cooperation with Boeing and Rolls-Royce.
ANZ announced at the conference that the test flight had a 1.2% better fuel efficiency than Jet-A fuel but a whopping 60%+ reduction in CO2 emissions.
A listing of news articles that came out of the conference may be found on our Eco-Aviation page here.
A330 vs 787
Another in the continuing reports from the Airbus Innovation Days….
Airbus provided an A330/A340 market update during its Innovation Days presentations in Hamburg earlier in May.
The A340 has become irrelevant to the new airplane market, with only a handful of new orders remaining and virtually none forthcoming in the last several years. Airbus is tweaking the A340 with some aerodymic improvements designed to reduce fuel burn by 1%. Along with maintenance procedure changes to the A330, the A340 increases the interval on the A Check to 800 flight hours from the current 600; C Check intervals go from 18 months to 21-24 months; Intermediate Checks increased from five years at EIS to the current six years and remains unchanged; and Structural Checks increase from 10 years to 12 years.
We resisted asking whether the A340’s Product Improvement Package includes a large Parking Brake sign in the cockpit.