Pontifications: Mitsubishi nears first flight for MRJ-90

Aug. 3, 2015, © Leeham Co. Mitsubishi is just a few months away from beginning flight testing on the first commercial airplane designed and built in Japan since the NAMC YS-11 in the 1960s. The 60 passenger turbo prop had… Read More

Fancher takes on KC-46A; FAA investigating Allegiant Air

July 30, 2015: Scott Fancher, regarded as the person to come in and take over troubled programs at Boeing, has been named to take over the KC-46A program. Fancher originally came to Boeing Commercial Airplanes from the Boeing… Read More

Spirit Aerosystems: Higher profits on lower revenue

July 29, 2015: Spirit Aerosystems, whose principal business is a major OEM supplier to Boeing but which also makes fuselage panels for the Airbus A350, reported lower revenues but higher profits for the FY2Q2015. The press release is… Read More

Rockwell Collins sector sales below expectations because Boeing 787 doing so well

June 28, 2015: Rockwell Collins, a major supplier of aircraft systems, said in its FY3Q2015 earnings call Friday that aftermarket parts and provisioning sales were below expectations in part because the Boeing 787 and the Rockwell parts are… Read More

Pontifications: Boeing takes another charge on tanker program; What’s next?

July 20, 2015, © Leeham Co.: Boeing on Friday took another charges against its USAF aerial refueling tanker program, the KC-46A, this time $536m after taxes ($855m before taxes). This brings the charges to date to more than $800m… Read More

Options for Singapore Airlines to operate direct flights to the US.

By Bjorn Fehrm Subscription required. July 20, 2015 © Leeham Co. Last week week we wrote about how Singapore Airlines is in talks with Airbus and Boeing to find a suitable solution for its Ultra-Long Haul airplane needs…. Read More

Boeing’s McNerney on 787 costs, obsoleting airplanes

July 8, 2015: Bloomberg News interviewed Jim McNerney, then-CEO of The Boeing Co., June 15 at the Paris Air Show. (McNerney relinquished his CEO title a week later to Dennis Muilenburg.) Although McNerney got it wrong on the… Read More

Airbus, Boeing YTD orders assessed (Update)

Update, July 8: In our original post, we omitted 44 Boeing 737NGs from the YTD firm orders. The charts and text have been updated to reflect this information. July 7, 2015, © Leeham Co. Airbus pulled ahead of… Read More

CSeries performance improvement demystified

By Bjorn Fehrm Subscription required Introduction July 6, 2015, © Leeham Co. Bombardier presented a slew of new data for their CSeries aircraft during Paris Air Show. Listening to Bombardier (BBD) officials it sounded like there was only… Read More

Bjorn’s Corner: What Paris Air Show taught us about East and West.

  25 June 2015, © Leeham Co: With a few days in the office one can look back at Paris Air Show with a bit of perspective. So what are the impressions? It was surprising how many orders… Read More