Silicon Investor - Boeing keeps setting new highs! When will it split?

[roto] Boeing is adding a new 737 MAX assembly line as part of a goal to lift output to...

roto — 7/6/2026 5:52:17 PM

Boeing is adding a new 737 MAX assembly line as part of a goal to lift output to 47 jets per month and beyond.

google.com

Boeing officially activated its fourth 737 MAX final assembly line on July 6, 2026, at its facility in Everett, Washington. Known internally as the "North Line," this expansion marks the first time since the 1960s that a 737 aircraft is being built outside its historic home in Renton, Washington. The launch coincides with Boeing successfully satisfying Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requirements to raise its monthly production rate from 42 to

47 jets per month. [ 1, 2, 3]

Key Facts About the New Assembly Line

Location: Repurposed space within the massive Everett facility—the world's largest building by volume—which previously housed widebody programs like the 747 and 787 Dreamliner. [ 1, 2]
Design: Described by CEO Kelly Ortberg as a "carbon copy" or near-identical extension of the active Renton production lines. [ 1, 2]
Primary Focus: Structured initially to assemble the 737 MAX 10, the largest variant in the MAX family, which is awaiting final FAA certification anticipated by the end of 2026. [ 1]
Staffing: Operated by a strategic mix of experienced workers relocated from Renton and Moses Lake, alongside newly trained hires, to ensure manufacturing discipline. [ 1]

Future Production Roadmaps
While the current target has stabilized at 47 jets per month, the introduction of the North Line serves as the foundation for the following progressive capacity targets: [ 1, 2, 3, 4]

Target Rate (Per Month) [ 1, 2, 5]Projected TimelinePrimary Objectives

47 Jets	Current (July 2026)	Maintain quality controls under performance-based FAA oversight.
52 Jets	Early 2027	Integrate full multi-site factory capacity once the North Line matures.
63 to 70 Jets	Long-Term Evolution	Rapidly draw down a global backlog of nearly 4,830 unfilled orders.

This calculated ramp-up follows a period of restricted output imposed after the January 2024 Alaska Airlines midair door plug blowout. Boeing's current strategy emphasizes absolute production system stability over pure speed to prevent out-of-sequence assembly lapses. [ 1, 2, 3, 4]
If you are interested in tracking the rollout further, let me know if you would like details on the FAA certification progress of the MAX 10 or how Boeing's supply chain integrations affect delivery timelines. [ 1]

10 sites

Boeing's new 737 assembly line starts moving in Everett
Jul 6, 2026 — The start comes as Boeing ramps 737 production from 42 to ?47 jets a month after consulting with the Federal Aviation Administrati...

Reuters
Boeing new 737 Max assembly line Everett opens July 2026
Jul 5, 2026 — The fourth final assembly line, in Everett, Washington, is meant to support a target of 52 jets per month next year. ... Boeing $B...

qz.com
Boeing's 737 MAX Master Plan: How Boeing is Doubling 737 ...
Jun 21, 2026 — safety management system data or SMS. as long as Boeing's. live metrics show that defects are caught immediately. and out of s...

[Eric] [graphic] Illustration by The Atlantic* TECHNOLOGY THE BOEING 747 BEGINS ITS F...

Eric — 6/12/2026 3:52:06 PM

Illustration by The Atlantic*

TECHNOLOGY

THE BOEING 747 BEGINS ITS FINAL DESCENT

The jet was perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence. Its retirement signals an end to an era of American culture—and ambition.

By Ian Bogost

JUNE 12, 2026, 7 AM ET

i. the boneyard

through the heat haze, airplane tails rose from the desert. As I steered off the interstate toward Pinal Airpark, in Marana, Arizona, I got my first view of a corpse in full: a stark-white Boeing 747, its wings sheared off, its passenger doors open to the dust and wind, a rickety set of airstairs inviting no one aboard. The plane was a memory, a ruin, but its swooping, humped nose was still striking—a visage that signaled the freedom of movement in the Jet Age.

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I was arriving at this desolate site north of Tucson, where airplanes go to die, to mourn the 747, the original jumbo jet—a.k.a. the Whale, the Longreach, the Sky Cruiser, the Mother of All Airliners, the Queen of the Skies. For 50 years, the aircraft was the principal host of Important Journeys: a young student’s trip to study abroad in Paris, a first-generation American’s pilgrimage to their ancestral home in Hungary, an Iranian family fleeing the 1979 revolution. Combining the immensity of an ocean liner and the elegance of a swan, the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful. Over the past two decades, airlines have stopped using it as a passenger plane and replaced it with smaller aircraft that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable. The 747 was once a symbol of American might, invention, progress, and populism. Now it embodies the decline of all of those values.

Jim Petty, the airpark’s manager, led me out the back door of his small office to his truck, and we peeled out toward the long rows of forsaken aircraft. I had been calling Pinal a boneyard, but Petty told me that he doesn’t like the term. Some planes get brought here for a checkup, others for intensive care or storage. Some ailing vessels are delivered here with every intention of flying again, like an elderly relative sent to a short-term-care facility. But if rehabilitation proves impossible, Pinal becomes their final destination.

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Petty parked us under a TWA 747 that had been sitting there for almost 30 years. Its enormity eclipsed the hot desert sun. The tires alone were more than four feet tall, a memorial to outsize ambitions. From 1970, when the first 747 entered service, to 2023, when Boeing stopped building the plane, the company manufactured 1,574 of them, including the two that still serve as Air Force One. Most 747 routes spanned oceans and continents, giving travelers a speedier option than the Queen Mary had across the Atlantic, or the California Zephyr across the West. For generations, these jumbo jets flew to London, to Osaka, to San Francisco. But more recently, 747s have been flying to Pinal—drawn here by their own obsolescence.

“Some day,” Petty said, “there’s just going to be one left.”

ii. birth of an icon

starting the engines brings a sudden hush followed by a smooth roar. At 300-some metric tons, fully loaded, and with a wingspan that would cover two-thirds of a football field, the plane could be tricky to drive but was supple to fly. On the ground and about three stories up, pilots were aware of all they couldn’t see. Once airborne, though, a sense of infinity dawned out the cockpit windows, and of sheer mass behind the pilots. In the cabin, the heft makes the plane feel almost still, even at 500 miles an hour and 35,000 feet; it is the only plane I have ever flown in whose takeoff and landing were imperceptible to the senses. Paul Gallaher, a longtime 747 captain, told me he couldn’t remember a hard landing. He said that it was the plane every pilot wanted to fly, the top rung of a commercial-aviation career.

Like most technological innovations of the 20th century, the 747 project was catalyzed by the military. In the early 1960s, Boeing produced designs in response to a government request for a large military transport aircraft. Lockheed won that job and produced the C-5 Galaxy. Boeing’s loss steeled its resolve and freed up engineers to work on the biggest airplane ever built for commercial service. Boeing acquired 780 acres of land in Everett, Washington, just north of Seattle, and erected an assembly complex that included the largest building in the world by volume—at a cost of $200 million ($2 billion in today’s dollars)—to house up to eight 747s under construction. About 2,700 engineers labored on the project.

Aviation executives called a risk like this the “ sporty game”—a shameless mid-century, flannel-suit euphemism for staking an entire company on a single long-odds bet. Had the 747 project faltered, Boeing would likely have gone down with it.

Thomas Gray, who joined Boeing in 1961 as an electrical engineer, calls himself the “first passenger on the first 747,” responsible for in-flight testing. “Whether it was strain, arrows, airspeed, whatever,” he told me, “we had to measure all that data onto a tape machine.” Gray, a lanky man with a gray mustache, volunteers as a docent at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, just across from Boeing Field. For 17 years, the 747 served as his office. This was the Wild West of commercial aviation, after planes had been proven but when the Jet Age was still new and exciting.

Watching the plane’s first flight from the blast fence, in 1969, Gray remembers telling a fellow engineer beside him, “One of these days, there are going to be 747s lined up to take off.” He was right. Boeing’s earlier jets—the 707, 727, and 737—carried fewer than 200 souls. The 747 could carry north of 490 passengers, plus a massive amount of cargo, and still fly thousands of miles farther than most existing jets. Juan Trippe, who ordered 25 747s for Pan Am in 1966 at a cost of $5 billion in today’s dollars, saw the plane as an instrument of human flourishing. “The new era of mass travel between nations may well prove more significant to human destiny than the atom bomb,” he said at the time, calling the aircraft “a great weapon for peace.”

The jumbo jet would make the world smaller in the same way that railroads and ocean liners had in the century prior. This was the age of seemingly impossible endeavors undertaken and accomplished despite extreme risk; five months after the 747 first took flight, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. This spirit of rarefied American invention, fueled by both government investment and private capital, was meant to serve all humankind.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Francois Pages / Paris Match / Getty; Jim Gray / Keystone / Getty; AFP / Getty; Classic-ads / Alamy.

It worked. From 1969 to 1979, the number of people flying every year more than doubled, to 640 million. Flying was glamorous—in part because it was expensive, but also because the 747 was built for human comfort as well as fuel efficiency.

Speed was expected to supplant comfort, eventually. In anticipation of supersonic flight, the 747 was designed to shift into cargo duty sometime by the end of the ’70s; its cygnine hump allowed containers to be loaded through its nose, which opens like the mouth of a cartoon shark. But the supersonic passenger jet was a bust, and the 747 persisted. Its accidental longevity defined an era.

iii. legroom and caviar

the british architect Norman Foster once called the 747 his favorite building of the 20th century. Like the ocean liners and railcars it replaced, the 747 is more than a vehicle. It is also a dwelling.

The upper-deck lounge became the first and most important room in this building—though somewhat incidentally. The charge to make the plane capable of loading cargo through its nose required the flight deck to be situated above the main section. Once the flight deck was placed high, over the cargo slot, the plane needed to sweep back accordingly for aerodynamics, one retired Boeing engineer told me. What to put in that space?

A cocktail bar, obviously. Air France and United installed lounges with rotating seats to allow passengers to mingle. Air India put in bright-red carpeting and sofas, with images of apsaras on the bulkhead behind them. Qantas offered the nautical-themed Captain Cook Lounge, with lantern sconces, intricate woodwork, and rope-wrapped swivel seats and cocktail tables.

Boeing named its first 747 the City of Everett, after its birthplace, and painted it in Boeing’s corporate color scheme: white with a red cheatline, a gray belly, and a black glare panel. Gray and his colleagues used the City of Everett for testing; it was never outfitted with an interior. The aircraft now lives at the Museum of Flight. Visitors can take a tour inside but are generally not allowed up the spiral staircase to the upper deck and cockpit.

I negotiated an exception. When I ascended the tight stairwell, I was surprised to see it decorated as a lounge, complete with antiqued mirrors on the rear bulkhead, blue carpeting, and vivid, mod-printed seating. At some point in the City of Everett’s long life, an upholstery shop had redone the upper-deck seating with old Braniff Airways fabric.

Peggy Verger and Cheryl Grimm, two former United flight attendants, met me in the lounge to share memories of service on early 747s. For Verger, luxury wasn’t really the point of the plane’s interior design. “We’ve lost the personality of flying,” she said. At first I thought she was talking about the style—the Pucci-designed Braniff uniforms, or Eero Saarinen’s modernist terminals. But she meant personalities. She meant people. “We loved talking to the people,” Verger said. “The lounges, the wide aisles. We were tight with the passengers. ‘So how’s your dog?’ We were much more social.”

Travelers turned in their seats to their neighbors. They stood up and chatted with someone across the aisle. They moved through the cabin to a lounge, or to ask for a coffee. Sometimes, after giving children pin-on airline wings, the stewardesses—as they were called at the time—would recruit them to help pass out nuts or matches. “It just was all so different,” Verger added. “The passenger was a person.”

The food in first class was rich: hand-carved meats, lobster, caviar. Even fliers in the back ate like royalty; on a 1970 Pan Am flight from JFK to Heathrow, a coach-class passenger would have enjoyed filet mignon. Small sofa lounges were tucked into the front or rear of some aircraft. One Continental Airlines 747, called the Proud Bird of the Pacific, had a spacious Polynesian Pub in the coach cabin, with floral-print seats around low-slung pedestal tables. American Airlines built a coach lounge with black-and-white geometric carpet and red upholstered seating that anyone might mistake for a hotel lobby. American installed a piano bar there, too, although it used an electric organ (pianos are hard to keep in tune when subjected to the forces of takeoff and landing).

Features like these inspired Continental, in 1971, to advertise its 747 flights as “Air Cruises.” Grimm recalled constant activities and contests. Passengers celebrating a birthday or an anniversary could order a cake or a bottle of champagne. “It was just a nice party,” she said.

The cabin’s ceilings rose to eight feet—even at the window seats—and the exterior walls stood nearly straight up and down, allowing even the tallest passengers to stand upright, like a human instead of a sardine.

Use of the whole space was encouraged. Why make a building for people to remain seated in? A TWA pamphlet about 747 service from the early 1970s encouraged passengers to exercise on their flight: “Walk 13 times up and down the cabin and you’ve actually covered one mile.” Continental once boasted of removing 41 seats for four extra inches of legroom in coach. Even on a three-hour domestic flight, the experience of the airborne building was deemed as important as the transportation itself.

Wide-body airliners made global flight accessible to many people, but industry growth slowed by the mid-1970s. The 1973 oil shock made fuel more expensive, altering the fundamentals of the airline business. Hijackings surged, leading to the invention of airport security. In 1978, deregulation transformed the economics of the domestic airline industry. Fares dropped dramatically, and more people began to fly. As the clientele became more pedestrian, flying felt less cosmopolitan.

And the comforts started to vanish. The social spaces and coach lounges began disappearing so the airlines could cram in more passengers—including into the upper deck, which became certified for passenger seating during taxi, takeoff, and landing. The new hub-and-spoke model of air service started displacing milk-run paths. Domestic flights on the 747, such as the Chicago-L.A. leg of the Proud Bird of the Pacific, became rarer. Instead, the aircraft mostly flew people over oceans. The most beautiful building of the 20th century was becoming just another vehicle.

Fox Photos / Getty
A first-class lunch served in the nose of a Boeing 747, 1970
iv. metal tubes with wings

before the september 11 attacks closed terminals to the unticketed, anyone could pass through the metal detectors and go right up to the gate. You could do this to welcome or send off a loved one. You could meet up with a friend on a layover. Or you could just see the planes.

Cheryl Grimm remembers passengers bringing their friends to the gate, just to see her 747 taxiing. Pilots remember it too. Mark Vanhoenacker flew 747s for British Airways out of London until 2019, just before the airline removed the plane from service. He told me about disembarking at his favorite destinations—Cape Town, Tokyo, Vancouver—and looking over his shoulder in childlike wonder. I can’t believe I flew that airplane a third of the way around the world, he’d think to himself.

The aircraft began service in the middle of the Vietnam War. In 1975, after the tragic crash of a C-5 Galaxy military transport aircraft meant to evacuate Vietnamese orphans, two chartered Pan Am 747s stepped in as a part of Operation Babylift. That effort was accused of both propagandism and abduction. But many citizens were desperate to leave Vietnam, and they did so voluntarily, in the bosom of the Mother of All Airliners.

For that reason, Peggy Verger understood crewing the 747 as a patriotic act. She remembered a group of Vietnamese refugees boarding a flight of hers in Tokyo. “And when they got off—they were doctors and lawyers, and a lot of them spoke English—they would say things like Thank you for letting me come into your country,” she said, stopping to press her heart. “Tears coming down.” Grimm remembers similar scenes, on flights to Vancouver before Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule. Or Russian immigrants on flights to New York: a whole family, from the grandmother to the children, taking up an entire row of the airplane, each with just a little sack of belongings. Grimm would think to herself: Thank you, Lord, for letting me be born in America.

The 747’s fusion of aeronautical ability and symbolic power earned it many roles beyond passenger liner and freighter. By 1977, Thomas Gray, the Boeing engineer, was running test flights for a heavily modified Whale to carry the space shuttle Enterprise atop it. NASA used the plane to shuttle the shuttle from its landing sites back to the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. One icon of America had settled the global skies, and on its shoulders sat another, set to conquer the cosmos. The sight of the pair mated together suggested that the 20th century’s progress would never end.

It did, of course. The shuttle program closed in 2011, as 747s were already disappearing from the skies. Today, beholding a 747 in person has become harder, especially in the United States. The charter carrier Atlas Air flies some, as does the freight operator Kalitta, but even their numbers are dwindling as companies move to more efficient two-engine aircraft. Lufthansa flies the most scheduled passenger flights on the 747—between Frankfurt and destinations that include Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.—and Korean Air also still runs the plane overseas. But the 747 has moved downmarket: China, Iran, and Russia use them for bus-like domestic routes. Even when foreign carriers fly 747s, though, the sight of one of their planes invokes American ingenuity, because the aircraft was designed and built by America.

When the 747 is gone, other aircraft will service high-capacity, long-haul routes: the Boeing 777, for example, and the Airbus A350. But none of those planes will symbolize global access and renewal, because nothing about any other plane is symbolic. They all look and feel the same. They are just metal tubes with wings. When we are on a plane these days, we are really inside our headphones, sewn into our seats, yearning for it to end. The miracle of flight itself goes unnoticed, as even daytime travelers draw their shades. They do so to sleep, or to increase the contrast on their screen. Striking up a conversation is taboo. Six miles aboveground, you feel buried rather than aloft.

v. the flying oval office

the last 747 on Americans’ radar is the one carrying Donald Trump. Air Force One has been a 747 for nearly 36 years, since George H. W. Bush first ascended its staircase on September 6, 1990, to fly from Andrews Air Force Base to Topeka, Kansas, for a fundraising luncheon.

Air Force One is heavily modified and highly customized—its 4,000 square feet of interior space include a medical facility and two kitchens that can serve 100 gourmet meals—but from the outside, it still looks the same as any other 747, from Pan Am onward, apart from the color scheme and presidential seal. In previous eras, the most powerful person in the world boarded the same equipment that you might use to take a Hawaiian vacation. But there was something regal about a president descending those steps, or waving from the top of them, on foreign soil. The plane is a literal ship of state. On September 11, 2001, amid a nationwide ground stop while the country was under attack, Air Force One was George W. Bush’s “flying Oval Office,” to borrow Boeing’s phrase. Trump loves to do domestic flyovers—of his rallies, of a Washington Commanders game in November—and show off the sheer size of the plane at low altitudes.

But Air Force One has aged. The two 747s that currently share the duty are the same ones that Bush 41 flew on. In 2018, the first Trump administration struck a $3.9 billion deal with Boeing to make two new planes, based on the 747-8, the aircraft’s final variation. The planes were meant to be delivered by 2024, but they have not arrived. The project has been plagued by technical issues, supplier disputes, and alleged tomfoolery—empty mini tequila bottles were reportedly discovered on one of the airplanes under construction. Boeing has absorbed more than $2 billion in cost overruns on the project. (“We continue to make steady progress” on the project, a Boeing spokesperson told me.)

The stumble couldn’t have come at a worse moment for the company. Around the same time that Trump ordered the new Air Force Ones, Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft began experiencing software problems that eventually led to disaster, including two accidents that killed 346 people. All planes in the fleet were grounded. Boeing paid large penalties and settlements in the ensuing years, and faced increased competition from Airbus, its European rival. In January 2024, an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 suffered a door-plug blowout due to improper installation. The company that once played the sporty game to invent the jumbo jet couldn’t seem to make new versions of its bread-and-butter mid-range aircraft.

By spring 2025, still without his new Air Force One, Trump began to consider accepting a luxury-appointed Boeing 747-8 as a gift from Qatar instead. Despite concerns about corruption and national security, the government took the gift, valued at $400 million. Only a “stupid person” would decline a “free, very expensive airplane,” Trump said at the time. The cost of modifying the plane for presidential use is classified; “probably less than $400 million” is what Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told Congress last year. The Air Force announced on May 1, 2026, that the aircraft is scheduled to fly this summer, with a new red, white, and blue livery. Will the American taxpayer end up paying for both the retrofitting and the new planes? “Yes,” an Air Force spokesperson told me.

Another problem plagues a presidential 747, whether or not an emir delivers it: It is not a plane of the people anymore. It is a rarity, more often an opulent private palace than an instrument of common carriage. The likeliest way for me to fly on a 747 in the United States, at this moment, would be in a press seat on the president’s plane.

A common route for Air Force One these days is from Andrews Air Force Base to Palm Beach International Airport, for Trump’s weekends at Mar-a-Lago. I figured that the White House, and even the president himself, might welcome me aboard, to experience the greatest passenger plane in the sky over the greatest country in the world. The White House nearly gave me a seat in late January, but then the trip filled up. On one of the flights I was not aboard that weekend, Trump told reporters that he had opened airspace in South America so that some immigrants could “go back to Venezuela and stay, perhaps.” America has traveled a long way from Peggy Verger’s huddled masses yearning to fly free.

In recent years, the 747 has amounted to an old plane for an old-man president. What will its next iteration symbolize? If a new Air Force One finally rolls off the beleaguered Boeing line, it will still be a fully American lodestar, however faded its shine. If instead Trump flies on a gift from a foreign power, it won’t matter how American its bones are.

vi. farewell tour

flying is more a part of life than ever, but it feels disappointing at best, and inhumane at worst. This year, a Homeland Security shutdown created hours-long security lines; an elective war with Iran spiked the cost of fuel and ticket prices. Old dreams were forgotten too. The possibility of supersonic passenger travel has been abandoned in favor of trim-tab adjustments, such as Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, with its bigger windows and less arid cabins. The competition that deregulation once spurred has all but dried up. The few airlines that are left, having been allowed to consolidate into oligopoly, have abandoned the medium-size cities that were their former hubs, such as Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Memphis. The big four U.S. carriers—United, Delta, American, and Southwest—have effectively become banks: The difference between profit and loss comes down to the loyalty points they sell to their credit-card partners each year. Cramped passengers are ruled not by bonhomie but by hair-trigger aggression, while flight crews seek compliance rather than kinship. No frills are left to entice or distract passengers. The main benefit of sitting in first class is that you might still be served free cocktails, while a coach passenger is left with a puny bag of carbs, one cup of soda, and complimentary (for now) trash collection. Forget about power and freedom. Commercial airplanes no longer symbolize anything except a desire to be anywhere else. Nobody cares what kind of plane they fly in anymore, so long as they are on it as little as possible.

Adriana Zehbrauskas For The Atlantic
Planes sent to Pinal Airpark, in Marana, Arizona, for repair, storage, or scrapping

A quarter of the 21st century has now elapsed, but the 20th century, its engines cut, has managed to stay aloft. It is now finally landing, at Pinal Airpark in Arizona. “I flew the last passenger U.S. airplane to the desert,” Captain Steve Hanlon told me by phone from Atlanta, where he works for Delta as a flight-simulator pilot instructor. In 2017, Delta retired the aircraft (Ship 6314) and the rest of its 747 fleet for the same reason every other airline did and will: A four-engine jumbo jet is more expensive to operate than newer, if less striking, alternatives. Ship 6314 went on a farewell tour of former Northwest and Delta hubs, including hangar parties in Seattle, Detroit, Atlanta, and Minneapolis and a more somber affair in L.A. “Don’t say it’s ‘sad,’?” Hanlon remembers the Delta corporate reps telling him. They also changed how he referred to the vessel—“she,” as sailors have done since antiquity—in an interview for a corporate press release. “Instead they put ‘it,’?” he said, scoffing.

The scene aboard Ship 6314 was celebratory. A pilot and a flight attendant, who had met on a 747 military charter years earlier, were married in the air. But Hanlon, who had been flying 747s for 20 years, felt the pull of an ending as he held the Whale’s yoke, setting the aircraft down gently on the Pinal runway, with his co-captain, Paul Gallaher, by his side. “It was sad,” Hanlon told me. “Like putting my favorite dog down.” It was the last time either man would fly a 747.

Ship 6314’s phantom neighbors include the 747 that once transported the Ohio televangelist Ernest Angley, who used the plane to spread the good word before financial issues brought him back to Earth. Japan’s equivalent to Air Force One is also here. So is a 747 that was intended for Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz and cost $300 million; it flew for less than 50 hours and is now being scrapped at Pinal—the aviation equivalent of parting out a brand-new Bugatti.

When Jim Petty, Pinal’s manager, parked us under the long-forsaken TWA 747, he pointed out the grid of missing skin where aluminum from the fuselage had been cut in tidy rows to make plane tags, a type of aviation collectible. Nearby, a former Korean Air vessel’s nose cone had been removed clean, as if seared off with a hot knife. A galley intercom phone hung from a chasm in the tail of another 747, swinging as if dropped from a phone booth in a film noir. Just above it, Petty pointed out a hawk roost. “For five years they came here,” he said. “I always thought it was cool that a bird made its nest in a plane.”

When all of the useful parts have been claimed from a corpse, industrial scavengers tug the remains to a cement pad, where excavators tear the vessel into bits of metal, Petty explained. The scrap gets loaded onto 18-wheelers and hauled away for recycling. “It’s never used again to make an aircraft,” he said, “but it goes into wheels for cars, or beer cans.” Pointing at the Diet Coke he gave me upon arrival to quench my desert thirst, Petty noted that it might once have been a small piece of the Queen of the Skies.

Almost all of the engines had been harvested from these planes. Removing the weight can cause the planes to tip upward, and point their noses to the sky. The blades of one abandoned engine, lying at Pinal since 2014, issued a tinny clatter as they spun in the breeze. “It makes me think that the plane wants to head out,” Petty said. “It wants to go.” But both of us knew better. It was a death rattle, and for more than just a type of airplane.

In the faux–Braniff lounge aboard that first 747, at the Museum of Flight, I had asked Cheryl Grimm and Peggy Verger for their best memory of the aircraft. The former flight attendants couldn’t summon a story, and instead fell back on a feeling. “You were just happy to be there,” Verger said. Grimm could only echo that bygone affection: “You were just happy to be there.”

theatlantic.com

*Illustration source images: Adsr / Alamy; Jim Gray / Keystone / Getty; Diana Walker / Getty; Gene Glover / Agentur Focus / OSTKREUZ Archiv / Redux; Francois Pages / Paris Match / Getty; © SAS Museum Oslo Norway.

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “Queen of the Skies.”

[Eric] Alaska AirlinesBoeing & AerospaceBusinessAlaska Airlines still ‘proudly Boeing,’...

Eric — 1/7/2026 9:46:28 PM

Alaska Airlines still ‘proudly Boeing,’ now with Airbus in its fleet

Jan. 7, 2026 at 5:16 pm

Dignitaries heading towards the area where a press conference was to be held paused to check out a Boeing 787 repainted in Alaska Airlines new livery. Boeing and Alaska Airlines unveil paint job for its recently acquired 787 fleet at Boeing’s Seattle Delivery Center on Wednesday. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

Alaska Airlines ordered more than 100 Boeing planes Wednesday, the largest order in the airline’s history and a commitment to the Seattle-based manufacturer even as Alaska moves away from being “proudly all Boeing.”

Alaska had for years operated an entirely Boeing fleet, until last year when it acquired Hawaiian Airlines and, with it, a fleet of planes from Boeing’s European rival Airbus. Alaska executives have said the carrier will likely keep the Airbus planes, particularly the widebody aircraft that can travel further than Alaska’s 737 MAX fleet.

At an event Wednesday to celebrate the large order and introduce the first 787 painted with a new livery, Alaska displayed a new logo to replace its now out-of-date tagline: “Proudly Boeing.”

Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg speaks at a press conference where attendees get to see a Boeing 787 with its new Alaska Airlines livery. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)

Kelly Ortberg, the aircraft manufacturer’s CEO, said Wednesday the announcement was “more than an order.”

“This is a doubling down on (Alaska’s) commitment to Boeing,” Ortberg said.

In turn, Ortberg continued, Boeing knows it must “deliver high-quality airplanes.” He thanked Boeing employees and said their “focus on safety and quality, particularly in the last 18 months, has been critical.”

That sentiment is particularly meaningful for Alaska, which was thrust into a turbulent year in 2024 when a panel flew off one of its 737 MAX planes midair. Accident investigators determined Boeing delivered the plane to Alaska without four bolts properly installed to hold the panel in place. Boeing mechanics in Renton had installed the piece incorrectly after removing it for maintenance.

“We have an opportunity here to perform,” Ortberg said Wednesday. “This is going to be a big year for all of us.”

Alaska CEO Ben Minicucci said Wednesday’s order was a “historic day” for the carrier and that Alaska was ready to compete with the nation’s other large airlines.

Alaska is currently the fifth largest airline in the U.S., behind Delta, American, Southwest and United. Alaska partners with American through the oneWorld alliance.

Alaska CEO Ben Minicucci speaks after a news conference Wednesday. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)

At Wednesday’s event, Minicucci said, “with this order, with this gorgeous airplane behind me, we are going to compete against the big three and we’re going to win.”

Alaska’s order includes 105 narrowbody 737 MAX 10s and five widebody 787-10s. It also includes the option for an additional 35 737s down the line.

The narrowbody planes will act as Alaska’s “backbone” for its domestic network, flying transcontinental routes and to Hawaii and Alaska, Minicucci said. The widebody aircraft will help Alaska achieve its intercontinental ambitions.

On Wednesday, Alaska also introduced the first 787 painted in Alaska’s new global livery. The design is inspired by the aurora borealis, with a palette of midnight blues and emerald greens and flowing aura lines, Alaska said. It expects to feature the new design on its entire 787 fleet by the spring.

While updating the 787 design, the livery on Alaska’s other planes will remain the same, including the Alaska Native on the airline’s narrowbody planes and Pualani on Hawaiian Airlines’ aircraft.

Capitalizing on its acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines and new fleet of widebody aircraft, Alaska set out last year to turn its Seattle hub into a “global gateway,” with plans to offer 12 new long-haul international routes from Seattle by 2030. So far, it has announced five of those routes, launching nonstop flights to Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo-Narita in 2025 and London, Rome and Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2026.

An Airbus A330 is seen on the runway of Honolulu airport in Hawai‘i. (Courtesy Alaska Airlines)

The new order will bring Alaska’s 787 widebody fleet to 17, with five already in operation. Following the Hawaiian acquisition, the airline also has 24 Airbus A330s.

Alaska currently operates 248 737 narrowbody planes and, with the announcement Wednesday, now has 174 MAX planes on order. Some of the new MAX planes will replace Alaska’s existing fleet, while others will grow the carrier’s total aircraft count.

Alaska Air Group, which includes Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, regional carrier Horizon Air and ground support company McGee Air Services, currently has a fleet of 413 aircraft. The new order will bring its fleet to 475 planes by 2030 and 550 by 2035.

The 737 MAX 10s Alaska ordered have not yet been certified to carry passengers by the Federal Aviation Administration. The new MAX variant, which will be larger than the MAX planes flying today, has been delayed for years as Boeing worked to address an issue with the engine anti-ice system and navigates a strict regulatory process.

Boeing expects the MAX 10 and another variant, the MAX 7, will be certified this year.

Alaska’s order allows the airline to switch to a different MAX model “if necessary,” the carrier said in a news release.

But Alaska executives said Wednesday they were confident Boeing would get the plane certified this year. The company expects the first delivery of its new 737 MAX 10s in 2027 and 787-10s in 2028.

U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy speaks at a Wednesday news conference at Boeing Seattle Delivery Center. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who attended Wednesday’s event, said the deal signaled strong leadership at both Boeing and Alaska.

He pointed specifically to Ortberg, telling attendees that not too long ago, some in the aerospace industry were asking what would come next for Boeing after a tumultuous few years that included two fatal MAX crashes and a nearly catastrophic panel blowout. Ortberg answered that question, Duffy said.

Of Alaska, Duffy said, “you don’t have these kinds of deals done unless you have really well-run airlines.”

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessLocal BusinessBoeing turns cash flow positive, but del...

Eric — 10/29/2025 2:29:14 PM

Boeing turns cash flow positive, but delays 777X with $4.9 billion charge

Oct. 29, 2025 at 6:50 am Updated Oct. 29, 2025 at 9:20 am

A Boeing 777X at Boeing Field in Seattle. (Bloomberg)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

For the first quarter since a midair blowout in January 2024, Boeing generated more cash than it spent, marking a significant financial milestone on its path to recovery.

But the aerospace manufacturer is still struggling with long-delayed airplane programs, including two MAX variants and its 777X family.

On Wednesday, Boeing said it took a $4.9 billion charge on its 777X program in the third quarter and delayed the first 777-9 delivery to 2027.

“While we’re all disappointed with the 777X delays, it shouldn’t overshadow the progress we’re making,” CEO Kelly Ortberg told analysts on a call Wednesday morning. “Our customers are giving us great feedback. … We’re increasing production rate. We turned cash positive in the quarter, and we’re winning in the market.”

Boeing lost $4.8 billion from operations in the third quarter, which runs from July through September, compared to a loss of $5.8 billion in the same three months last year. It had a net loss of $5.3 billion, or a loss of $7.14 per share, compared to a net loss of $6.2 billion, or a loss of $9.97 per share in the third quarter of 2024.

Boeing’s revenue increased in the third quarter year over year, from $17.8 billion last year to $23.3 billion this year.

It reported free cash flow of $238 million, marking the first quarter with positive cash flow since the end of 2023. By comparison, in the same three months last year, Boeing reported negative free cash flow of $1.9 billion as it struggled to recover from the panel blowout and faced a Machinists strike that halted production at its Puget Sound factories for nearly two months.

Related on boeing

The upturn this year is due to increased production of its commercial planes, Boeing executives said Wednesday.

In the third quarter, Boeing’s commercial airplanes business generated $11 billion in revenue, up from $7.4 billion in the same quarter last year.

Boeing delivered 440 commercial airplanes in the first nine months of this year, nearly 100 more than it delivered all of 2024. It also recorded 774 orders through September, more than double its orders from the same time last year.

Analysts have attributed some of that surge in orders to President Donald Trump’s trade negotiations, with countries placing large aircraft orders to possibly curry favor with the U.S. administration.

Earlier this month, the FAA lifted a production cap on Boeing’s 737 MAX that has been in place since the midair panel blowout last year. Ortberg told analysts Wednesday that Boeing is already producing at a higher rate, rolling out 42 MAX planes per month.

Boeing is working through a similar process with the FAA to increase production of its 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina, and expects to roll out eight per month “in the near future,” Ortberg said.

On the 777X program, Ortberg said there are no new issues with the plane’s airframe or engine. Boeing completed testing this quarter on the airplane’s brakes, engines, takeoff performance and aerodynamic performance but it still has a “significant portion” of the certification program to work through, Ortberg said.

A new phased certification approach with the FAA is taking longer than expected, Boeing’s new Chief Financial Officer Jay Malave told analysts Wednesday. Boeing had anticipated moving to the next phase in the third quarter, but now expects it won’t do so until later this year or early 2026.

With the new charge in the third quarter, Boeing has now accumulated $15.9 billion in charges on its 777X program, according to analysts from Agency Partners.

“The market may be inclined to shrug off another charge,” particularly as it focuses on increased production for Boeing’s certified models, Agency Partners wrote in a note to analysts Wednesday. “But the scale of the charge reminds us that there may be other stings in the tail to come.”

The $4.9 billion charge from the 777X program increased Boeing’s loss per share in the third quarter by $6.45, Boeing said.

Boeing is also still working on a solution to an engine anti-ice issue on its yet-to-be-certified 737 MAX 7 and 10 variants. It will have to make hardware and software modifications to its test aircraft, Ortberg told analysts. Boeing expects FAA certification for both MAX variants in 2026.

Meanwhile, Boeing Global Services, which provides aftermarket support and other services for customers, generated $5.4 billion in revenue, compared to $4.9 billion last year.

Boeing’s defense business generated $6.9 billion, up from $5.5 billion in the third quarter last year. It increased deliveries by 24% compared to the first nine months of 2024.

Most Read Business Stories

Boeing defense workers in St. Louis have been on strike for nearly three months, but company executives said Wednesday the ongoing labor dispute has not had a material financial impact. The strike includes about 3,200 workers, and is much smaller in scale than the Puget Sound strike that included 33,000 employees last year.

Boeing beat its own estimates for the quarter in part because of higher-than-expected production rates, and because it did not make an expected payment to the Department of Justice to settle a criminal charge related to two fatal 737 MAX crashes six years ago.

The$445 million charge that Boeing outlined in its estimates for this quarter was part of a deal struck between the DOJ and Boeing to resolve allegations that Boeing had misled safety regulators about a new feature on its MAX plane. That software system led two planes to crash in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. The families who lost loved ones in those crashes have objected to the deal, arguing that it does not hold Boeing accountable.

The deal is still pending approval from a federal judge in Texas. It’s not clear when the charge would appear in Boeing’s financial results.

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessBeta’s electric aircraft lands at Boeing Field, car...

Eric — 10/29/2025 2:26:14 PM

Beta’s electric aircraft lands at Boeing Field, carrying a legacy of ‘firsts’

Oct. 29, 2025 at 10:00 am Updated Oct. 29, 2025 at 10:00 am

People are invited to take a closer look as BETA Technologies exhibits one of its fixed-wing all-electric aircraft at King County International Airport-Boeing Field on Tuesday, October 28, 2025, in Seattle. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

1 of 2 | People are invited to take a closer look as BETA Technologies exhibits one of its fixed-wing all-electric aircraft at King County International Airport-Boeing Field on Tuesday, October 28, 2025, in Seattle. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

As air taxis creep closer to reality, Beta Technologies is touring its electric aircraft around the country.

The Vermont-based manufacturer is one of several companies working on electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft, part of a broad movement to find more efficient and environmentally sustainable options for air travel.

eVTOLs are battery operated and take off like a helicopter. The companies building them promise lower costs and reduced carbon emissions but have yet to receive certification from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly with passengers.

Beta, hoping to seek some regulatory approval as soon as next year, is competing with California-based Archer Aviation, which has promised air taxis at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, and Boeing-backed Wisk Aero, which plans to be certified and flying in the U.S. by 2030 and in Australia by the 2032 Olympics held there.

Joby Aviation, another California-based competitor, has partnered with Delta Air Lines to bring eVTOLs to commercial service and to the Department of Defense for military applications.

Beta is working on an eVTOL but, in an effort to speed regulatory approval, it is also developing a “conventional” takeoff and landing aircraft, a smaller, electric version of traditional commercial planes.

In an aviation milestone, the Beta Technologies plane that arrived Tuesday became the first electric passenger aircraft to land at Boeing Field. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

In an aviation milestone, the Beta Technologies plane that arrived Tuesday became the first electric passenger aircraft to land at Boeing Field. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

A Beta Technologies fixed-wing all-electric aircraft arrived Tuesday at Boeing Field and will depart Thursday. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

The all-electric aircraft that Beta brought to Seattle carries a pilot, five passengers and luggage. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

As it gears up to seek FAA certification as soon as next year, Beta is taking its conventional model around the country, introducing it to regional airports and government officials.

On Tuesday, it stopped at Seattle’s Boeing Field, carrying forward the region’s legacy of aviation “firsts,” said Dave Decoteau, deputy director of King County International Airport-Boeing Field.

“We’re also leading the way here in environmental sustainability, which falls right in line with Beta’s technology,” Decoteau said, pointing to the airport’s investment in an electric sweeper and a hybrid rescue vehicle. “Today, we build on that proud legacy.”

Beta’s cargo electric plane visited Boeing Field about a month ago, Decoteau said. The passenger version on display Tuesday is the first electric passenger aircraft to land at the airport.

When it takes off again on Thursday, it will be the first aircraft to use Boeing Field’s newly updated short runway. The runway has been closed since March for the $27 million upgrade.

Meeting ALIA

Beta’s electric plane, named ALIA, can carry five passengers, a pilot and luggage. It can fly up to 386 miles, traveling at a speed of 176 mph.

Beta estimates its eVTOL model could reduce operating costs by 74%, compared to a traditional helicopter. Its conventional model, or CTOL, could trim costs by 42% compared to traditional aircraft, the company says.

Beta Technologies’ all-electric passenger plane is powered by one electric motor and one five-blade propeller. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

The pilot’s display on the flight deck is seen as BETA Technologies exhibits one of its fixed-wing all-electric aircraft at King County International Airport-Boeing Field on Tuesday in Seattle. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

Beta Technologies is working on an electric plane that takes off and lands vertically, similar to a helicopter, but also this more conventional passenger craft. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

The conventional takeoff plane is powered by one electric motor and one five-blade propeller. The VTOL aircraft has four additional lift motors, and four two-blade lift propellers.

Beta and its competitors have for years made ambitious promises about the future of electric aircraft. So far, none have been certified by the FAA and many have pushed back their own estimates for entry into service.

This summer, those companies got a boost in confidence from the Trump administration when it announced a plan to streamline the certification process and get electric aircraft in the skies.

Beta has four conventional aircraft flying today and one VTOL, as well as two more VTOLs on the production floor. It is hoping to receive FAA certification by late 2026 or early 2027.

With a partnership with UPS and investment from Amazon’s Climate Pledge fund, Beta is first focused on transporting cargo, then will turn to passenger service. It’s also working with medical technology and aviation companies to one day use its aircraft for organ and tissue deliveries.

In June, regional carrier Republic Airways said it would purchase one of Beta’s conventional takeoff aircraft for crew training. In July, the FAA certified Beta’s five-blade propeller, which it developed with Ohio-based Hartzell Propeller.

The plane that visited Boeing Field on Tuesday is about to mark its first birthday; it rolled off Beta’s production line in Burlington, Vermont, last Nov. 7, said Chris Caputo, the director of flight operations. It has flown 475 hours and covered about 30,000 miles.

“To me, having been in aerospace for 35 years now … the reality of it is really mind-blowing to me,” Caputo said.

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Investing in Washington

Beta has three options for charging its electric aircraft, Caputo said Tuesday: a network of chargers waiting at airports around the country; portable chargers that fit in the back of the plane and plug in wherever it lands; and a mobile charging truck that will follow the aircraft on the ground.

Beta has more than 50 airports in its charging network, including some internationally.

Washington is not on that list.

Thea Wurzburg, who handles state and local government relations for Beta, said the company doesn’t yet have any infrastructure in Washington. But Beta has been in conversations with airports in the region and the state’s Department of Transportation.

“The lowest-hanging fruit is getting the charging infrastructure in place,” Wurzburg said, adding that the funding for those projects is often a partnership between Beta and other stakeholders. Some states have invested in the company and the infrastructure, she said.

In Washington, Beta hasn’t been in touch with Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Wurzburg said. Though it has landed in crowded hub airports, Beta is first targeting smaller, regional airports for its charging network where there is more time and space to experiment, like Boeing Field.

Ann Richart, aviation director for Washington state Department of Transportation who attended Tuesday’s event, said her department’s role is to prepare the infrastructure behind the scenes while innovators like Beta prepare the technology.

Ann Richart, Aviation Director, Washington State Department of Transportation, speaks at an event where BETA Technologies exhibits one of its fixed-wing all-electric aircraft at King County International... (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

WSDOT isn’t in charge of allocating the state’s funds, for the most part, Richart said, and wouldn’t decide if Washington partners with Beta or another electric aircraft startup.

As Richart works behind the scenes, she said she’s “looking at the industry as a whole, not just one or two manufacturers.” When she meets with companies like Beta, she’s most interested in hearing about their “use cases,” to determine if it will fit Washington’s needs.

Richart has some concerns with electric aircraft, for instance: Electricity isn’t a totally green solution, and it isn’t foolproof.

She wants to make airports “mini electric grids” that can operate on their own if they need to. At the same time, she wants to invest in hydrogen-powered aircraft, and assess the state’s existing airports to ensure there are not any “gaps” where emergency response couldn’t easily reach an airport in the event of a natural disaster.

The recharge port is seen at right, as BETA Technologies exhibits one of its fixed-wing all-electric aircraft. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

State Rep. Jake Fey, a Democrat representing the 27th District who also attended Tuesday’s showcase, said Washington won’t have the resources to be a “big investor” in electric aircraft companies — but it can create an environment that attracts them through tax breaks and other incentives.

“It’s something we need to facilitate,” he said. “It helps us not only with mobility but also moving to a fuel system that doesn’t have carbon emissions.”

“We’ve been working on looking at how we’re going to deal with growth and demand in air travel,” Fey continued, referencing the crowding at Sea-Tac Airport that is already threatening to delay flights as planes move through the crowded airspace.

Electric aircraft like Beta’s ALIA “isn’t the single answer,” he said. But it could be “one of the answers.”

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.

seattletimes.com

[roto] The Boeing Company (BA): A Bull Case Theory Ricardo Pillai Wed, October 22, 2025...

roto — 10/22/2025 1:32:40 AM

The Boeing Company (BA): A Bull Case Theory
Ricardo Pillai
Wed, October 22, 2025 We came across a bullish thesis on The Boeing Company on Boudreau Capital Newsletter’s Substack by Nicolas Boudreau. In this article, we will summarize the bulls’ thesis on BA. The Boeing Company's share was trading at $217.08 as of September 29th. BA’s forward P/E was 71.43 according to Yahoo Finance.

Boeing has faced significant challenges over the past several years, including COVID-19 disruptions, 737 Max 8 quality issues, and certification delays for the 777X and Max 7/10, but recent leadership changes under CEO Kelly Otterberg, appointed in August 2024, have set the stage for a turnaround. Otterberg’s mandate focused on resolving the commercial operations strike, improving aircraft quality, and advancing the 777X certification process.

H1 2025 results reflect early progress, with revenues up 26% to $42 billion and 280 commercial deliveries, led by 209 737 Max 8s. While commercial operating margins remain negative at –5.8%, this is a marked improvement from –17.4% in H1 2024, driven largely by steady 737 Max production, which is capped at 38 by the FAA but expected to rise to 42 later this year. Widebody production, particularly the 787, is ramping up toward 10 per month, while 767 and 777 freighters continue at stable rates through 2027.

On the defense side, Boeing is addressing historical fixed-cost contract risks by shifting to cost-plus agreements, exemplified by the F-47 fighter win, with margins in BDS expected to rise from 2.1% to 9–10%, aligning with peers like Lockheed Martin. Boeing Global Services remains a reliable cash generator with 19.9% margins on $10.4 billion revenue. Debt has been reduced to $44.6 billion from $52.5 billion in 2024, aided by a $10.55 billion sale of digital aviation solutions and an equity raise in 2024, while free cash flow is trending toward positive in Q4 2025.

Strategically, Boeing is reorienting its culture toward engineering excellence, retooling the C-suite, and pursuing critical certifications for the 777X and Max 10/7 variants. Combined with Spirit Aerospace acquisition for fuselage quality and Airbus production constraints, Boeing is poised to regain market share in widebody and single-aisle segments. With commercial margins improving and free cash flow set to accelerate, the stock presents a compelling upside of 40–60% over the next 2–3 years, underpinned by production ramps, certification milestones, and structural improvements across the business.

Previously we covered a bullish thesis on The Boeing Company (BA) by DeepValue Capital in March 2025, which highlighted its strong backlog, leadership changes under Kelly Otterberg, and potential for $10 billion in free cash flow. The company's stock has appreciated approximately by 22% since our coverage. The thesis still stands, and Nicolas Boudreau shares a similar perspective but emphasizes H1 2025 results, production ramps, and certification milestones as near-term catalysts.

finance.yahoo.com

.

[roto] but the Air- build goes on.. Airbus to inaugurate new China assembly line as t...

roto — 10/21/2025 11:22:51 AM

but the Air- build goes on..

Airbus to inaugurate new China assembly line as treads trade tightrope
By Tim Hepher and Sophie Yu
October 21, 2025

The Airbus logo at the company's pavilion during the 55th edition of the International Paris Air Show at the Paris-Le Bourget Airport, in Le Bourget, near Paris, France, June 20, 2025.
MOHAMMED BADRA/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

Airbus to open second assembly line in Tianjin, China
Expansion aims to boost A320neo production capacity
Airbus balances trade tensions between US and China

PARIS/BEIJING, Oct 21 (Reuters) - Airbus (AIR.PA), opens new tab is poised to open a second assembly line in China with limited fanfare this week, days after securing an extra foothold in the United States as it walks a tightrope between divided trade powers, industry sources said.

The second line at the port city of Tianjin near Beijing will increase Airbus' manufacturing capability for best-selling A320neo-family single-aisle jets, mirroring the addition of a second line in Mobile, Alabama, just over a week ago.

Make sense of the latest ESG trends affecting companies and governments with the Reuters Sustainable Switch newsletter. Sign up here.

Unlike the inauguration of its first non-European assembly line, at a high-profile ceremony involving 600 guests in Tianjin more than 15 years ago, this week's expansion will be a relatively low-key affair with no Western media allowed.

Airbus declined to comment.

Industry sources said earlier this month that the two back-to-back ceremonies in Mobile and then Tianjin were being designed to avoid falling foul of a tricky trade climate between China and the United States.
Since Airbus first announced the overseas expansion plans in 2022 and 2023, Washington and Beijing have plunged into a months-long trade war, leaving Airbus and some other European companies anxious to avoid offending either trade power.

Airbus relies on U.S. parts to assemble jets in China and Europe and also depends on smooth ties with the United States, where several of its major airline customers are based.

At the same time, Airbus has been negotiating to sell up to 500 planes to China, a goal first reported by Reuters in April. Sources have said it is likely to secure only part of the order to coincide with the new Tianjin factory expansion.

Boeing has been negotiating a similar 500-plane deal but this remains mired in the back-and-forth discussions over trade, industry sources said, confirming a Bloomberg report.

Airbus is increasing capacity to support higher production of its A320neo family to 75 jets a month in 2027. Doubling capacity at Mobile and Tianjin is part of the industrial plans.

reuters.com

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[roto] Airbus brutal How engine shortages sent almost-new Airbus jets to the scrapyard...

roto — 10/21/2025 8:22:00 AM

Airbus brutal

How engine shortages sent almost-new Airbus jets to the scrapyard
By Tim Hepher, Allison Lampert and Eva Manez
October 20, 2025

[1/5]An aircraft technician dismantles an A321NEO aeroplane, whose parts will be reused by the company Ecube, at Castellon Airport, in Castellon, Spain, October 16, 2025.
REUTERS/Eva Manez Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

Prices of spare Pratt & Whitney GTF engines have been soaring
Spike caused by supplychain snags and long repair waiting times
Over a dozen almost-new Airbus jets scrapped for their engines
IATA airline industry boss says 'something seriously wrong'-

CASTELLON DE LA PLANA, Spain, Oct 20 (Reuters) - At Castellon airport in eastern Spain, workers in hazmat suits wriggle through hatches of a nearly new Airbus (AIR.PA), opens new tab jet, stripping out parts as if gutting a mechanical whale. Once a semi-deserted airport, Castellon has become a graveyard for aircraft caught in a global engine crisis.

Despite booming demand for planes, a severe shortage of next-generation fuel-efficient engines has flipped market economics: in some cases, the engines are now worth more than the aircraft they power when offered as spares.

The imbalance has led to more than a dozen Airbus jets being dismantled for parts after only a few years in service, with dozens more awaiting their fate, according to industry insiders.

AIRBUS JET SCRAPPED AFTER SIX YEARS

The unusual trend, driven by delays in Pratt & Whitney (RTX.N), opens new tab GTF engine production and maintenance, has sounded the death knell for jets like the six-year-old A321neo being broken up in Castellon. The A321neo is part of the A320 family, which this month ousted Boeing's 737 as the most-delivered jetliner.

The Spanish airport, for years blighted by a lack of passengers, is the growing hub for a lucrative financial trade as UK-based eCube harvests parts from almost-new jets for investor clients.

"I can’t say I remember it happening on this scale before, because we’ve never had an issue like this on such a popular engine," said Lee McConnellogue, CEO of the company, which says it can release usable parts or recycle virtually the whole jet.

Skilled workers strip out avionics, wheels and wing parts.

Engine housings sit on the wings like empty husks, with their precious powerplants wrapped in blue covers to become spares worth up to $20 million. They are urgently needed by airlines forced to ground jets because of queues for engine repairs.

The problem worsened in 2023 when Pratt & Whitney disclosed a rare powder-metal defect that could cause cracking, prompting calls for inspections of 600-700 GTF engines through 2026.

According to Cirium data, one-third of the GTF-powered Airbus fleet or 636 jets are grounded or in storage. The equivalent percentage for planes with engines from competitor CFM (SAF.PA), opens new tab is 4%.
Pratt & Whitney and Airbus had no immediate comment.

'SOMETHING WRONG'

The jet engine squeeze is disrupting airline operations worldwide, as carriers struggle to meet passenger demand and unlock the promised 15% fuel savings of new aircraft.

Most airlines say they are short of jets after years of delivery delays and are keeping older planes flying longer.

But in some cases, financial owners can earn more by stripping engines than by leasing out the jet itself.
For example, the engines can be rented out as spares for some $200,000 a month each, according to UK-based Cirium. That is at least as much as a whole plane with engines. Add to the pot revenue from breaking up the rest and the deal makes sense.

"It's a paradox where there's so much demand, why on earth would people be parting out aircraft," said Austin Willis, CEO of Willis Lease (WLFC.O), opens new tab, which bought some of the engines.

The engine bubble overshadowed a recent meeting of the International Society of Transport Aircraft Trading (ISTAT), a teeming ecosystem of aircraft traders and lessors who buy, sell or finance almost every aspect of a jet from nose to tail.

"It's a financial play ... There have been billions of dollars of private equity capital bidding for aircraft and engines to part out in recent years," Naveo consultant Richard Brown said.

"It shows aviation has become a super-efficient marketplace," he added in a telephone interview.
But airline leaders question how aircraft built to fly for more than 20 years and save millions of gallons of fuel are being dismantled so quickly.

"It tells you something is seriously wrong," said Willie Walsh, head of the International Air Transport Association, which last week predicted $11 billion in costs from supply disruption this year including $2.6 billion in engines alone.

Critics say the crisis has its roots in an overreaction to high oil prices above $140 a barrel at around the time engine makers were designing current models. Engine design involves a balancing act between optimising efficiency or durability.

"They went too fast and the engines had great improvements in efficiency but they failed on maintenance," leading aviation economist Adam Pilarski told Reuters during the ISTAT event.

Engine executives argue the fuel savings benefit airlines on every mile flown, while maintenance delays are temporary. Even so, Pratt admits it will take years to end bottlenecks.

Chris Calio, CEO of Pratt & Whitney parent RTX (RTX.N), opens new tab, said last month that groundings had stabilised and would fall, but that “clearly we have more work to do.”

Now some are eyeing the fate of Airbus planes discarded by Spirit Airlines as the U.S. carrier faces bankruptcy.

"I don’t think the die is completely cast on what’s going to happen to Spirit, but it’s inevitable that some of those aircraft will (be broken up)," eCube's McConnellogue said.

reuters.com

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[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessLocal BusinessSeattle Times coverage of Boeing’s diffi...

Eric — 10/10/2025 6:47:40 PM

Seattle Times coverage of Boeing’s difficult 2024 takes top reporting award

Oct. 10, 2025 at 11:00 am Updated Oct. 10, 2025 at 11:00 am

A cargo door is craned in before installation on a 777 freighter at the Boeing Everett Production Facility on June 26, 2024 in Everett. (Jennifer Buchanan / The Seattle Times)

By
Levi Pulkkinen
Seattle Times business editor

The Seattle Times team covering two crises facing Boeing in 2024 — a midair blowout aboard a Boeing 737 MAX jet and a historic Machinists strike — was honored Thursday with a Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious honor in American business journalism.

Seattle Times reporters Lauren Rosenblatt, Paige Cornwell and Patrick Malone were recognized, as was longtime Times aerospace reporter Dominic Gates, who retired earlier this year after 22 years with the newspaper. They were honored for beat reporting, tying with The New York Times, which was recognized for its coverage of the succession disputes surrounding the Murdoch family’s media empire.

The five Seattle Times stories submitted for consideration included visual journalism by Seattle Times photographers Jennifer Buchanan and Dean Rutz, and by Seattle Times graphic artist Fiona Martin.

“The Seattle Times has been committed for decades to covering Boeing and the aerospace industry because of its impact on the region’s economy,” Seattle Times Associate Publisher Ryan Blethen said in a statement. “I’m so proud of the journalists named as award recipients, but also acknowledge the many reporters, photojournalists, editors and more that brought the dozens of stories related to this event to readers.”

On Jan. 5, 2024, an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX airliner fresh from Boeing’s factory in Renton suffered a nearly catastrophic failure when a door-shaped panel blew out over Portland, Ore. In the wake of that near-disaster, the reporters uncovered a chain of events stretching into Boeing’s past.

Boeing, until recently the world’s top jet maker, started 2024 confident of a comeback after an existential crisis set off five years earlier by two fatal crashes. The confidence evaporated after the January incident. The blowout precipitated a year of layoffs, plunging profits, congressional hearings and leadership shake-ups. The manufacturer’s troubles intensified that fall, when 33,000 factory workers launched what would prove to be a 53-day strike.

The Loeb Awards were established in 1957 by the late Gerald Loeb, a founding partner of E.F. Hutton, a once-prominent Wall Street brokerage. Loeb hoped to encourage and support reporting on business and finance that would inform and protect the private investor and the general public.

Rosenblatt traveled to New York City to receive the award on behalf of the team at a banquet Thursday.

The Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing honored the coverage earlier in the year, awarding a collection of stories on the 2024 blowout with a prize for transportation coverage. The Seattle Times business coverage was also recognized by SABEW, a business journalism organization, with an honorable mention for general excellence.

Seattle Times reporters received a Loeb Award in 2020 for their coverage exposing a design flaw in the 737 MAX that caused two deadly crashes, and in 2011 and 2002 for investigations, respectively, into Washington’s adult family homes industry and medical experimentation at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

The Seattle Times has been a locally owned, independent news organization for more than 129 years.

Levi Pulkkinen: 206-464-3193 or lpulkkinen@seattletimes.com. Levi Pulkkinen is the business section editor at The Seattle Times, where he leads a team of reporters and editors covering economic life in the region.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessInternational TradeMarketsNationNation & WorldWorldBoe...

Eric — 10/2/2025 5:51:04 PM

Boeing 777X to slide into 2027, driving billions in charges

Oct. 2, 2025 at 2:30 pm

A Boeing 777X at Boeing Field in Seattle. (David Ryder / Bloomberg)

A Boeing 777X performs a flying display at the Paris Air Show. (Benjamin Girette / Bloomberg)

By
Julie Johnsson
and
Siddharth Philip
Bloomberg

Boeing’s 777X is slated to fly commercially for the first time in early 2027 instead of next year, people familiar with the matter said, a fresh setback to the U.S. planemaker that sets the stage for potentially billions of dollars in accounting charges.

Deutsche Lufthansa, the launch customer for the widebody aircraft, is already laying the groundwork for a fresh setback. The German airline isn’t including the 777X in its fleet plans until 2027, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential. Officials at Emirates, the 777X’s biggest customer, have also grown more cautious as it looks at entry into service possibly not before 2027.

Related

Boeing’s long-delayed 777X falling behind schedule, CEO Ortberg says

Analysts estimate the noncash accounting charge could run from $2.5 billion to as much as $4 billion, though Boeing has not detailed the extent of the cost. But executives have held meetings with major investors in recent weeks and are charting out damage-control messaging that the financial impact will be spread across the overall jet program, according to one of the people.

The jet, already six years late, is of major strategic and financial importance to Boeing in its duel with Airbus for a bigger slice of the lucrative long-haul market. Boeing executives are set to discuss the extent and cost of the latest schedule slip for the hulking jet when Boeing reports earnings on Oct. 29.

A Boeing spokesperson declined to comment, citing a quiet period ahead of earnings. A spokesperson for Lufthansa deferred questions on the delivery schedule to the manufacturer.

Last month, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg revealed to a Morgan Stanley conference that 777X certification was falling behind schedule, though he didn’t provide a new timeline. He attributed the latest setback to a “mountain of work” rather than any new technical issue with the plane or its engines.

“As you know, even a minor schedule delay on the 777 program has a pretty big financial impact because we’re in a reach-forward loss situation,” Ortberg said. “So we’re looking at that real hard.”

For analysts, Ortberg’s comments fit a familiar pattern. The planemaker has often used investor conferences to signal negative news and set expectations for its quarterly earnings. The CEO’s reference to program losses under Boeing’s arcane accounting methodology indicated the noncash accounting charge would be substantial.

Another delay to the start of deliveries for Boeing’s upgraded 777, which was originally due to fly commercially in 2020, would also crimp cash needed to help the company leave behind years of crises and financial bloodletting.

Related

on boeing

Boeing expects to start generating cash this year, fueling optimism that the U.S. manufacturer has regained a grip on production under Ortberg, who joined in August 2024.

Boeing has already racked up more than $11 billion in cost overruns for the 777X, which has encountered a string of setbacks and faced tough Federal Aviation Administration scrutiny in the aftermath of two fatal 737 MAX crashes last decade.

The program is in a reach forward-loss position, meaning Boeing won’t recover its development costs across the first 500 airplanes it builds and sells. The company must immediately book any additional abnormal costs and overruns as a charge to earnings.

Sheila Kahyaoglu, an analyst with Jefferies, predicts Boeing could report a charge as large as $4 billion from the delays. That covers cash payments the manufacturer would have received next year from delivering 18 of the planes, as she’d expected, as well customer concessions and other costs.

Bloomberg’s Leen Al-Rashdan and Sonja Wind contributed.

This story was originally published at bloomberg.com. Read it here.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessEconomyInternational TradeLocal Business Boeing’s new ...

Eric — 10/1/2025 9:13:47 AM

Boeing’s new plane has been ‘a long time coming,’ analysts say

Oct. 1, 2025 at 6:00 am Updated Oct. 1, 2025 at 6:01 am

A worker walks past one of the huge factory buildings on April 7, at the Boeing Renton Factory where narrowbody commercial airlines, including the Boeing 737 MAX and others, are manufactured. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

As Boeing continues to recover from the reputational damage following the Alaska Airlines panel blowout in January 2024 and two fatal 737 MAX crashes six years ago, industry watchers are asking what’s become the perennial question: When will Boeing build its next all-new aircraft?

Boeing walked away from plans to launch a new plane shortly after the fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, leaving a gap in the market that its European rival Airbus quickly filled. Airbus now outpaces Boeing in orders and deliveries, though Boeing is closing the gap this year as it increases production and scores large international orders.

But, since the crashes, the COVID-19 pandemic and last year’s Alaska Airlines blowout, many have wondered when Boeing will return to its new plane and what it will look like.

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing may be getting started, citing anonymous sources who said the company is in the early stages of designing a new narrowbody jet to replace the Renton-built 737 MAX.

A Boeing spokesperson said the company is focused on other priorities, but “at the same time, as we have done over the decades, our team evaluates the market, advances key technologies and improves our financial performance, so that we will be ready when the time is right to move forward with a new product.”

The next narrowbody plane is at least 10 years away from launching, aerospace analysts said Tuesday, but it’s not a surprise the discussion is starting.

George Ferguson, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, said a replacement for the MAX has “been a long time coming.”

“If you’re Boeing,” he said, “it’s time to redo the airplane.”

Replacing the MAX

The plane Boeing was set to launch before the deadly MAX crashes would have been a middle-of-the-market aircraft, meant to fall in between the 737 narrowbody and the 787 widebody.

When Boeing dropped its plans, still reeling from the deadly crashes that grounded the MAX for 20 months, Airbus launched the A321XLR to fill that hole.

Boeing has since worked to claw back its reputation among airlines, regulators and the flying public, but it still lags behind its European rival. Last year, Boeing delivered 348 airplanes while Airbus delivered 766.

Now, Boeing is due for a new narrowbody.

Related on Boeing

The 737 MAX is built on the same airframe that Boeing designed for its first iterations of the 737 more than 60 years ago. Rather than debuting an entirely new single-aisle jet, Boeing instead modified the existing design over the years, changing things like the placement of engines and introducing new software.

Ferguson said those modifications led Boeing to trouble. When designing the 737 MAX, Boeing moved the engines forward and, consequently, introduced a new software system meant to help pilots fly the plane. A flaw in that system led to the two fatal crashes that killed 346 people.

“You just don’t want to be in a situation to need a system like that again,” Ferguson said. “They don’t want to go further down that road.”

Meanwhile, Airbus is preparing for its next new plane. It plans to launch a replacement for its single-aisle A320neo in 2030, with entry into service in 2038, according to Scott Hamilton, an analyst with aviation consulting firm Leeham News.

“Boeing must be ready to move when Airbus does,” Hamilton wrote in response to the news Tuesday. “Of course it’s working on a 737 replacement. It would be corporate malpractice not to be.”

Choosing an engine

Boeing also needs to design a new airframe to take advantage of new engine technology that will make aircraft more fuel efficient, saving money and helping companies reduce emissions.

The wings on the 737 MAX are too low to the ground to fit new, larger engines, which rely on larger fans.

Boeing will have to wait for those new engines to be ready before it can launch a new aircraft. But once the technology is there, it will have its pick of power sources.

A consortium of three companies — General Electric, CFM International and Safran — is working on a new open-rotor engine, which means the blades are not encased in the usual tubelike structure attached to the fuselage. RTX’s Pratt and Whitney is working on an updated geared turbofan engine.

Rolls-Royce is also “pitching” its new engine to Boeing, according to The Wall Street Journal report. Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg reportedly visited Rolls-Royce in the U.K. earlier this year to learn about its engine for a new narrowbody aircraft.

Most Read Business Stories

Rolls-Royce is “hungry” for a project like a Boeing narrowbody, Ferguson said, because it would guarantee a high volume of planes in production. But he doesn’t expect it will beat out the General Electric joint venture, which builds the engines for the 737 MAX and some 787s.

A spokesperson for General Electric said Tuesday “we’re proud of our long-term partnership with Boeing and regularly discuss our technology advancements for the future of flight.”

‘Precursors to a new plane

’Sheila Kahyaoglu, an analyst with Jefferies, told investors in a Tuesday note that Boeing likely was interested in checking out the new engine technology, but that doesn’t change its aims.

Instead, she said, the company remains focused on increasing 737 MAX production, certifying its long-delayed 777X family, improving its defense business outlook and restoring its balance sheet. Boeing had $53 billion in debt at the end of the second quarter, according to the company’s financial reports.

Boeing closes the gap in race with Airbus
As Boeing ramps up in production and clinches massive orders from around the world, the aerospace manufacturer is catching up to its industry rival.

Sources: Airbus, Boeing (Reporting by Lauren Rosenblatt, graphic by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)

Meeting those goals are “precursors to a new plane,” Kahyaoglu wrote.

Historically, it has taken Boeing about five years from the launch of a new aircraft program to entry into service, Kahyaoglu wrote, though that timeline has been stretched for its recent programs, including the 777X and two new MAX variants.

Ortberg told analysts at a September conference that the slow certification process will stand in the way of launching a new plane. He hopes to work with the Federal Aviation Administration “in swinging the pendulum back,” and streamlining the certification process after the FAA heightened its scrutiny of Boeing following the deadly MAX crashes.

“I can’t imagine that we can do a new airplane without having that process refined,” Ortberg said.

That same month, the FAA said it planned to propose changes to speed up certification of commercial airplanes by the end of this year.

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] exclusive Airlines Boeing Has Started Working on a 737 MAX Replacement While...

Eric — 9/30/2025 6:25:15 PM

exclusive
Airlines

Boeing Has Started Working on a 737 MAX Replacement

While CEO Kelly Ortberg has focused on addressing quality issues and financial concerns, a new narrow-body plane is in development

By

Benjamin Katz

and

Drew FitzGerald

Sept. 29, 2025 9:00 pm ET

Airplanes at Boeing's factory in Renton, Wash. Photo: Chet Strange for WSJ

Boeing is planning a new single-aisle airplane that would succeed the 737 MAX, according to people familiar with the matter, a long-term bid to recover business lost to rival Airbus during its series of safety and quality problems.

Earlier this year, Chief Executive Kelly Ortberg met with officials from Rolls-Royce Holdings

in the U.K., two of the people said, where they discussed a new engine for the aircraft. Ortberg appointed a new senior product chief in Boeing’s commercial plane business, whose prior role was developing a new type...

wsj.com

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessFAA allows Boeing to help certify 737 MAX and 787 plan...

Eric — 9/26/2025 3:42:09 PM

FAA allows Boeing to help certify 737 MAX and 787 planes are safe to fly

Sep. 26, 2025 at 10:45 am

Boeing employees work on a 737 MAX on the Renton line in 2023. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

The Federal Aviation Administration will once again allow Boeing employees to help certify that the company’s planes are safe to fly.

The FAA revoked that authority for Boeing’s 737 MAX in 2019, after two fatal crashes caused by faulty software on the then-new plane, and for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner in 2022, because of production quality issues.

On Friday, the FAA said it would “allow limited delegation to Boeing” to issue airworthiness certificates on some 737s and 787s. Starting Monday, Boeing and the FAA will issue the airworthiness certificates on alternate weeks.

The regulator said it had thoroughly reviewed Boeing’s production process and would continue to maintain “direct and rigorous oversight” of the aerospace manufacturer.

“Safety drives everything we do, and the FAA will only allow this step forward because we are confident it can be done safely,” the regulator said in a statement.

Boeing’s authority to help the FAA with some tasks, like certifying that planes are safe to fly, comes from a program called Organization Designation Authorization, or ODA.

The program, which has been in place at Boeing since 2005, is meant to help the FAA maintain oversight with limited staff and resources. It allows some Boeing employees, called unit members, to work on behalf of the FAA, certifying inspections, repairs and other tasks in the factory.

The FAA renewed Boeing’s Organization Designation Authorization, for tasks other than the airworthiness certificates, in May for another three years.

The ODA program has been heavily scrutinized for the amount of oversight it gives Boeing. ODA unit members have for years alleged they felt pressured by their Boeing counterparts to move quickly and approve tasks in order to meet schedules and delivery deadlines.

This month, the FAA fined Boeing $3.1 million for quality system violations and allegations of “undue pressure” on ODA unit members. The fine focused on actions from September 2023 to February 2024, the months leading up to and directly after a panel blowout on an Alaska Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon.

The FAA found that a Boeing employee who was not involved in the ODA program pressured an ODA worker to sign off on a 737 MAX airplane so Boeing could meet its delivery schedule, even though the ODA worker had determined the aircraft did not comply with standards.

Boeing has spent the months since the panel blowout designing and implementing a safety and quality plan and said earlier this year it is seeing improvements to its oversight program, according to the company’s annual safety briefing, released in May.

It hired an ombudsperson to act as a neutral third party to address employee concerns, added more employees who could perform tasks on behalf of the FAA and improved its “pipeline” to address retirements.

Boeing didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment Friday.

The FAA said Friday it would continue to observe Boeing’s safety culture and ensure that the company’s employees feel they can report concerns without fear of retaliation.

The regulator said that renewing Boeing’s ability to certify airworthiness for its planes will allow FAA inspectors to survey other parts of the production process, like “critical assembly stages,” and take a high-level view at trends within the company.

The FAA still caps Boeing’s 737 MAX production at 38 planes per month, a threshold put in place after the panel blowout to ensure the company is focused on quality and safety in its manufacturing processes. Boeing executives have said they are preparing to ask the FAA to lift the cap in the coming months.

This story will be updated.

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessInternational TradeMarketsNationNation & WorldNation &...

Eric — 9/26/2025 1:47:20 PM

Boeing scores Turkish Air order for 50 planes, options for more

Sep. 26, 2025 at 4:40 am Updated Sep. 26, 2025 at 6:57 am

A Turkish Airlines Boeing 737-800 lands at Geneva Airport in Switzerland. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)

By
Leen Al-Rashdan
Bloomberg

Boeing landed one of its biggest deals this year, with Turkish Airlines agreeing to buy as many as 225 jets following a White House meeting between President Donald Trump and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Turkey’s flagship carrier will purchase 50 787 Dreamliners, with options for 25 more, according to a stock exchange filing Friday. Deliveries are scheduled between 2029 and 2034.

Talks with Boeing for 150 narrowbodies — 100 firm and 50 options for the 737 MAX 8 and Max 10 — have also been completed, pending a final agreement with engine maker CFM International Inc., Turkish Airlines said.

Negotiations are ongoing with Rolls-Royce Holdings PLC and General Electric Co for the purchase of wing-mounted engines, spare engines, and engine maintenance services for the widebody 787 aircraft.

Aircraft deals have become a staple of Trump’s meetings with foreign leaders. In recent months, he’s taken credit for getting major purchases over the line, from British Airways buying US-made jets to Qatar placing the biggest widebody order in Boeing’s history.

The Turkish accord gives Trump a win as he seeks to reduce the US trade deficit and burnish his dealmaking credentials. For Erdogan, it marks progress toward resolving a standoff over Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 fighter jets that strained ties between the NATO allies.

Related

The Boeing order could exceed $22 billion based on Ishka Ltd. valuations that account for industry-standard discounts. Turkish Airlines, which has ambitions to nearly double its fleet in the next decade and make Istanbul a global hub, also ordered as many as 230 jets from Airbus SE in 2023.

Erdogan has championed a strong national carrier to help put Turkey and its $1.4 trillion economy on the global map. Turkish Airlines says it already flies to more countries than any other carrier, using its hub in Istanbul as a major transfer point.

This story was originally published at bloomberg.com. Read it here.

seattletimes.com

[roto] Boeing Stock Up On $8 Billion Order, Close To 'Huge' China Deal HARRISON MIL...

roto — 9/23/2025 10:51:04 AM

Boeing Stock Up On $8 Billion Order, Close To 'Huge' China Deal

HARRISON MILLER
Updated 09:53 AM ET 09/23/2025

Boeing stock shifted higher on a slew of order and delivery news. The Dow Jones plane maker landed a deal with Uzbekistan Airways, while closing in on major purchases from Turkey and China.

* Boeing on Monday announced that it secured a deal with Uzbekistan Airways for 22 of its 787 Boeing 787. Uzbekistan Airways purchased 14 Boeing 787-9 planes with options for eight more jets, marking the largest order in the airline's history.

* ..Vietjet on Monday took delivery of its first 737-8 plane from Boeing as part of the Vietnamese airline's $32 billion order for 200 planes..
(interesting.. I've flown Vietjet a few times this past couple years. They're the worse airline in S.E. Asia. Not just my own lonesome opinion)

* Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan plans to buy hundreds of Boeing airliners and Lockheed Martin ( LMT) fighter jets..

investors.com

[roto] ' F-47 Felon'.. 4yrs, w/b up&go taking on Maduro's banana boats First F-47 n...

roto — 9/23/2025 10:02:54 AM

' F-47 Felon'.. 4yrs, w/b up&go taking on Maduro's banana boats

First F-47 now being built, will fly in 2028: US Air Force chief

The first F-47, Boeing's successful pitch for the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter aircraft, is now being built and will fly for the first time in 2028, Gen. David Allvin said. (Air Force)

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – The Air Force’s first F-47 fighter is now being built by Boeing, and the advanced jet is expected to have its initial flight in 2028, Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said Monday.

defensenews.com

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessBoeing’s long-delayed 777X falling behind schedule, CE...

Eric — 9/11/2025 8:40:37 PM

Boeing’s long-delayed 777X falling behind schedule, CEO Ortberg says

Sep. 11, 2025 at 4:16 pm

Boeing’s fifth 777X makes its final approach into Paine Field as part of its inaugural flight on Aug. 5 in Everett. (Nick Wagner / The Seattle Times)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

Boeing is falling behind schedule for its newest family of planes, the 777X, CEO Kelly Ortberg said Thursday.

The company is making progress on securing certification from the Federal Aviation Administration for the long-delayed Everett-based 777X program but, Ortberg said, Boeing is at a point in the process where it should be “burning down” its checklist with the FAA.

Instead, it still doesn’t have authorization from the regulator for a “good portion of the certification program,” Ortberg told analysts at a Morgan Stanley conference Thursday.

“We’re clearly behind our plan in getting the certification done,” Ortberg added.

The 777X family, which includes two passenger planes and one freighter, has faced years of delays since Boeing introduced the new model in 2013. Boeing needs certification from the FAA to carry passengers and cargo, and to deliver the planes to airline customers.

Once certified, the 777X family will be larger and more fuel-efficient than other widebody planes on the market, featuring wings so long that Boeing had to add foldable wingtips to allow the plane to fit into airports. It is powered by the largest jet engines ever built.

But the new family of planes has been stymied by manufacturing defects and heightened regulatory scrutiny, in part because of two fatal 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019. Following the crashes, the Department of Justice accused Boeing of misleading safety regulators about a new software system on the MAX plane.

On Thursday, Ortberg said the FAA’s certification process now is “way too slow” and he hopes to work with the regulator in “swinging the pendulum back.”

The current process is standing in the way of Boeing’s next big milestone, Ortberg continued: building an entirely new plane.

That’s partly because Boeing needs to clear the existing certification hurdles in order to deliver planes and generate the cash it needs to launch a new plane, and partly, Ortberg said, because of the slow pace.

“I can’t imagine that we can do a new airplane without having that process refined,” he said.

Ortberg started as CEO in August 2024, taking the reins from Dave Calhoun as the company was still reeling from a panel blowing off an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX earlier that year. He spent his first year at the helm focused on stabilizing production of Boeing’s existing commercial models, particularly ramping up production of the 737 MAX in Boeing’s Renton factory.

Now, seeing improvement, Ortberg said Thursday he hopes to turn his attention toward certification of new planes, including the 777X and two new MAX variants. Boeing executives have previously said the company will begin deliveries for all the new models in 2026.

The MAX variants — the 737 MAX 7 and 737 MAX 10 — have been delayed due to an issue with the plane’s engine anti-ice system. Ortberg said Thursday that Boeing is “making really good progress” and is working with the FAA on certification of a new design.

For the 777X family, the FAA granted approval for Boeing to begin official flight tests in July 2024, marking a significant step toward the long-delayed certification. But that progress stalled a month later when Boeing discovered a crack in a structural component that connects the plane’s engine to the airframe.

Sign up for Evening Brief Delivered weeknights, this email newsletter gives you a quick recap of the day's top stories and need-to-know news, as well as intriguing photos and topics to spark conversation as you wind down from your day.

Since then, Boeing has celebrated milestones in its path to 777X certification, including developing a solution to the cracks. In July, it officially began production of the newest 777 freighter. In August, it marked the first flight for its fifth 777-9 plane, the commercial variant of the 777X family slated to hit the market first.

Ortberg said Thursday that Boeing has not identified any new technical issues with the plane, adding that “both the airplane and the engine are really performing quite well.”

To cross the certification finish line, the FAA needs to grant Boeing “type inspection authorization,” or TIA.

While the regulator has approved “incremental TIAs,” Ortberg said the company has yet to achieve all the phases, meaning “we can go fly, but we can’t get the certification credit.”

Ortberg said he has asked Boeing’s new Chief Financial Officer Jay Malave to “spend some time … really looking at this schedule slip” to understand the financial impacts.

“Even a minor schedule delay on the 777 program has a pretty big financial impact,” Ortberg said.

With more than 500orders, “demand for the aircraft is fantastic,” he continued. “It’s going to be a great airplane. We’ve just got to get ourselves through this certification program and the mountain of work is still in front of us.”

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessBoeing jet deliveries surge as key 737 milestone appro...

Eric — 9/9/2025 9:58:25 PM

Boeing jet deliveries surge as key 737 milestone approaches

Sep. 9, 2025 at 12:39 pm

1 of 2 | Boeing 737 MAX planes outside at the company’s manufacturing facility in Renton. (Bloomberg)

By
Julie Johnsson
Bloomberg

Boeing delivered 57 commercial aircraft in August, its best performance for the month since 2018, in the latest sign of steadying factory operations as the U.S. plane-maker targets faster production rates.

The tally, which included 43 of Boeing’s 737 family of jets, is the second-highest of the year and marks an uptick from July, according to data posted Tuesday on the company’s website. August’s results underscore Boeing’s recent improvements in stabilizing its factories as the manufacturer prepares to ask regulators for permission to return output of the best-selling jet to pre-COVID-19 levels.

Gross orders for Boeing totaled 26 during the month against two cancellations. The company recorded 83 net orders, including those added to its backlog under a U.S. accounting provision for at-risk deals. For the year, the U.S. plane-maker has landed 725 gross orders against 600 for Toulouse, France-based Airbus.

Related on aerospace

Boeing has started to narrow an output gap with market leader Airbus that’s stood since the U.S. manufacturer fell into a series of crises starting with the first of two fatal 737 MAX crashes in late 2018. Through August, Boeing has delivered 385 jets this year to 434 for its European rival, which handed over 61 aircraft for the month

Since the beginning of 2024, Boeing’s output deficit to Airbus has narrowed by more than half, based on the average of trailing six-month deliveries, according to Jefferies analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu.

Boeing is sharing with U.S. regulators a series of measures of the health of its production system before a formal request to speed its 737 assembly lines to a pace of 42 jets per month, from the current cap of 38.

The company has told airline customers it’s optimistic it will be able to raise rates by October, Ryanair Chief Executive Officer Michael O’Leary told reporters on Aug. 27.

This story was originally published at bloomberg.com. Read it here.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessLast MAX stored at Boeing ‘shadow factory’ after crash...

Eric — 8/27/2025 10:17:57 AM

Last MAX stored at Boeing ‘shadow factory’ after crashes, pandemic departs

Aug. 27, 2025 at 6:00 am Updated Aug. 27, 2025 at 6:00 am

Boeing 737 MAXs are seen parked at Moses Field in September 2022. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)

Boeing 737 MAXs are seen parked at Moses Field in September 2022. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

After six years of work, Boeing has flown the final in-storage 737 MAX out of Moses Lake, marking the end of a grueling chapter in the company’s history.

Boeing began storing MAX planes at Moses Lake, as well as other facilities in the region, in San Antonio and in Victorville, Calif., in 2019, after two fatal MAX crashes led the Federal Aviation Administration to ground the plane. The FAA’s mandate lasted 20 months, eventually prompting Boeing to halt production of its most popular plane.

But, optimistic that the MAX would return to the skies quickly, Boeing mechanics continued building the plane in the company’s Renton factory for 10 months before the production halt, leaving Boeing with hundreds of planes in storage.

Boeing’s MAX storage inventory grew in 2020, when the COVID pandemic upended air travel and airlines canceled deliveries amid the financial crunch.

In what Boeing called “shadow factories,” mechanics maintained the engines and other systems on the parked planes, ensuring everything continued to work correctly. For some planes, mechanics installed a new software package to fix the MAX’s flawed flight-control system. That software — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System — was implicated in the two fatal plane crashes in 2018 and 2019, which killed 346 people.

Boeing has spent the last six years maintaining and reworking that stash of planes, which reached 450, including 250 stored at Moses Lake. This month, Boeing finished working its way through that inventory.

It flew the final stored 737 MAX from Moses Lake to Seattle, according to an internal company announcement viewed by The Seattle Times. Boeing had already worked through the remaining stored planes at its other facilities.

With the Moses Lake flight, all the stored MAXs “have been reactivated for delivery,” Boeing wrote, “marking the ‘beginning of the end’ for 737 MAX storage operations.”

The final stored plane’s departure was first reported Monday by trade publication Flight Global. The plane will get a fresh coat of paint before delivery to Air China later this year, according to Flight Global.

For Boeing, the maintenance and rework has been a financial drain and slowed its production of new planes.

Each parked plane took cash out of Boeing’s pocket, as it couldn’t collect on the final delivery to airline customers, and took workforce and equipment away from its other production lines.

Joseph Phillips, an economics professor at Seattle University, called the shadow factory a “distraction” that was pulling Boeing’s resources away from “the core of what they want to do … build planes and put them out the door.”

“Now, they don’t have to use those resources that way,” Phillips said. “They can turn around and use them for something much more productive.”

Just as Boeing’s MAX inventory grew, the company similarly had to devote time and resources to a shadow factory in Everett, designed for reworking the company’s widebody 787 Dreamliner. There, mechanics repaired small gaps at the fuselage joins of 122 planes. Boeing closed that shadow factory in February after five years of operation.

Now, with the end of the Dreamliner rework and the stored MAXs, Boeing expects to see improved profit margins, because “you don’t have these two very expensive shadow factories up and running anymore,” then-Chief Financial Officer Brian West told analysts earlier this year.

Boeing has been expecting to reach this milestone this year, though its timeline was slightly pushed back after a Machinists strike in the fall halted production at Boeing’s Puget Sound-area factories for two months.

West told analysts at the most recent earnings call in July that Boeing would finish reworking the stored MAX planes in the third quarter, which runs from July to September.

Boeing ended the second quarter with 20 737 MAX 8 planes in storage, West said on the call. All those are slated for customers in China, he added.

Boeing declined to comment on the final MAX rework this month, pointing instead to West’s recent remarks, and declined to share how many employees are based in Moses Lake.

At its “peak,” there were nearly 1,000 people working on more than 250 stored MAX planes in Moses Lake, Boeing wrote in its internal company announcement.

The company has already shifted some workers from Moses Lake to Renton, to join the production lines for new MAX planes, but the work won’t stop in Eastern Washington.

Employees there “will now turn to other projects,” Boeing wrote in its internal post, including maintaining its inventory of 737 MAX 7s and 10s, two variants that are awaiting certification from the FAA.

Boeing has about 35 combined MAX 7s and MAX 10s in stock, West said in July.

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessBoeing interfered with electric plane startup Zunum, a...

Eric — 8/16/2025 2:29:21 PM

Boeing interfered with electric plane startup Zunum, appeals court finds

Aug. 15, 2025 at 3:52 pm

An artist’s rendering from 2018 of Zunum’s concept hybrid-electric commuter airplanes. (Courtesy of Zunum Aero)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

Boeing may again be on the hook for allegedly stealing trade secrets from Bothell-based electric airplane startup Zunum Aero.

Zunum, which folded in 2019, sued Boeing a year after its closure, accusing the plane manufacturer of using its position as an investor to steal the startup’s designs and dissuade other groups from investing, preventing Zunum from gaining a foothold in the aerospace industry.

A Seattle jury ruled against Boeing in 2024, determining that Boeing had misappropriated Zunum’s trade secrets and breached its contract with the startup. But a federal judge reversed that verdict just two months later, clearing the jet-maker of all charges.

On Thursday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision yet again, reinstating a $72 million verdict against Boeing. The appeals court remanded the case back to the district court to finalize the verdict.

The appeals court found that Zunum introduced substantial evidence at trial that could lead the jury to conclude Boeing had interfered with the startup’s business prospects and that the jet-maker had discussed using Zunum’s information for its own hybrid electric plane project.

The three-judge appeals court panel also found that federal District Judge James Robart failed to disclose that his wife had acquired Boeing stock during the course of the litigation. The appeals court assigned the case to a new district judge.

The latest ruling “affirms what we have said from the start — that Zunum had an enormous opportunity to remake air travel, but Boeing took that opportunity away,” said Vincent Levy, an attorney with Holwell, Shuster and Goldberg, who is representing the startup. “The decision fully restores the jury’s verdict, vindicating Zunum’s hard-fought efforts to protect its groundbreaking technology.”

Boeing declined to comment on the litigation. Robart could not immediately be reached for comment.

Zunum Aero, founded in 2013 by Ashish Kumar and Matt Knapp, was working to develop a small hybrid-electric airplane that would fly short-hop routes around the country. It hoped to lower the cost and environmental impact of those short flights.

The startup had venture capital funding from Boeing’s HorizonX and JetBlue’s investment arm, and received an $800,000 grant from Washington state’s Clean Energy Fund.

But Zunum ran out of money in 2019 and shut down most of its operations. According to the company’s website, it has paused “most developmental activities” and stored its hardware at leased facilities in Washington and Indiana. Zunum used less than a third of the Washington Clean Energy Fund grant before it folded.

In 2020, Zunum sued Boeing in King County Superior Court and accused its former investment partner of a “targeted and coordinated campaign” to access the startup’s proprietary information, intellectual property and trade secrets. Zunum alleged that Boeing copied the startup’s plans, designs and technologies for its own hybrid electric project.

Boeing, in court documents, denied Zunum’s allegations. It said the startup’s failure was due to mismanagement and “lack (of) a realistic business plan.”

Boeing had developed a “conceptual mock-up” to evaluate the feasibility of Zunum’s proposed plane, the company said in court records, and concluded that the hybrid-electric aircraft would not be economically viable for commercial flight anytime soon.

After an eight-day trial, a jury sided with Zunum in June 2024 and awarded $72 million in damages to the startup.

In August 2024, Judge Robart overturned that verdict and found that Zunum failed to provide substantial evidence that its alleged trade secrets were, in fact, trade secrets and failed to show that Boeing’s actions had caused harm.

Nearly a year later, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined Thursday that Robart had overlooked relevant evidence introduced at trial.

That evidence included Boeing’s internal communications that suggest the plane-maker “intended to modify its own in-house designs, methods and strategies” with information from Zunum, according to court records, as well as evidence that showed Boeing employees discussed the difficulty of replicating Zunum’s technology.

“The jury could have reasonably concluded that Boeing improperly used Zunum’s trade secrets for competitive purposes,” the ruling read.

Furthermore, “the jury could have reasonably determined that Boeing’s misuse of Zunum’s confidential information destroyed Zunum’s competitive advantage, which caused Zunum to lose future investment and partnership opportunities,” the ruling continued.

It pointed specifically to a proposed partnership between Zunum and French aerospace company Safran.

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The appeals court reversed the district court’s decision to grant a new trial and assigned the case to a new judge.

It found that Robart’s wife had twice acquired Boeing stock through an IRA during the course of this litigation. Robart learned of the stock purchases in May and June 2023 but did not disclose the transactions until September 2024, one day before entering the final judgment in Boeing’s favor, the appeals court wrote.

In the days after Robart’s decision in favor of Boeing was first publicized in August 2024, Boeing’s stock rose about $10, from $169 per share to $179. That was also one week after Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg started on the job, replacing embattled CEO Dave Calhoun.

In its Thursday ruling, the appeals court said Robart’s “delayed disclosure, taken together with the district court’s consistent rulings in Boeing’s favor during and after trial, could give an objective observer reason to question the district judge’s impartiality in further proceedings.”

This story includes information from The Seattle Times’ archives.

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessBoeing’s fifth 777-9, part of delayed 777X family, tak...

Eric — 8/5/2025 11:12:36 PM

Boeing’s fifth 777-9, part of delayed 777X family, takes first flight

Aug. 5, 2025 at 1:02 pm Updated Aug. 5, 2025 at 4:21 pm

Boeing’s fifth 777-9 climbs out of Paine Field as it takes flight for the first time Tuesday in Everett. (Nick Wagner / The Seattle Times)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

EVERETT — Boeing’s fifth 777-9 took its first flight from Paine Field on Tuesday, marking another step in the jet manufacturer’s journey to get its latest plane model out of the factory.

The 777-9, part of Boeing’s 777X family, has been delayed for years as the company worked to fix defects and faced heightened regulatory scrutiny after fatal 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019. But Boeing executives now are optimistic that the plane will receive certification from the Federal Aviation Administration, with first delivery expected in 2026.

Once in the air, the 777X family will be more fuel-efficient than other widebody planes on the market, Boeing says, featuring the largest jet engines ever built and wings so long that the plane has foldable wingtips so it can fit into airports.

Boeing’s four 777-9 test planes have collectively flown 1,400 flights and more than 4,000 hours.

On Tuesday, a fifth plane entered the mix when it took off for its first ever flight around 11 a.m. from Paine Field, near Boeing’s Everett plant. It is the first time Boeing has launched a 777-9 first flight in five years.

Boeing employees and spectators gathered to watch the takeoff from the balcony of the Future of Flight museum or the grassy areas outside the airport. The crowd cheered and snapped pictures as the all-white plane taxied toward the runway, unfolded its wing tips and prepared for takeoff.

The plane made a deliberate stop at the end of the runway during its first go-round, to test that the brakes worked as expected. Then, it repeated the process and took off into the sky.

The plane, WH286, is a production plane, meaning it won’t be used for the same tests that the other four planes in the 777-9 fleet have been performing.

Unlike flight test planes, production planes are not equipped with unique wiring, sensors and other systems to collect data during flight for the certification process. The production plane also doesn’t yet have interior features like seats and side walls. Those pieces will come later.

Its primary function is to test that the plane can withstand a lightning strike without any damage to its critical systems.

But, before it can head off in search of a lightning storm, Boeing sent the production plane on a first flight to check that all the systems are working as expected. First flights typically check movable systems, like that the landing gear raises and lowers properly, and that the plane can move through different turns and bank angles.

Boeing has already performed those tests on the ground and recreated them in the air Tuesday.

“The whole point of a first flight is to not be surprised,” said Boeing spokesperson Lori Gunter. “It’s really just exercising the airplane.”

People watch as Boeing’s fifth 777-9 taxis Tuesday morning before taking off on its first flight. Others observed from the balcony of the Future of Flight museum. (Nick Wagner / The Seattle Times)

Boeing’s fifth 777-9 taxis at Paine Field as it prepares for its first flight on Tuesday. Boeing is optimistic that the plane will get full FAA certification and that first delivery can be made in 2026. (Nick Wagner / The Seattle Times)

The plane flew from Paine Field to Moses Lake, Grant County, before returning to Everett around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday. The 2 hour and 27-minute flight reached an altitude of 39,000 feet and an airspeed of Mach .84, or the equivalent of ground speed of 511 knots.

Ted Grady, chief pilot for the 777-9 who was flying the plane Tuesday, said the first flight went “seamlessly.”

“It really was a pretty smooth flight. You could tell that the team had the airplane in excellent condition,” he said.

Grady has been involved with the 777X program since its very first flight, and piloted the first flight for the second 777-9. Now, the launch of the fifth plane “feels like progress,” he said. “We’re expanding and growing and making progress.”

The plane will perform one more local test before heading to Arizona to begin testing its resilience against electromagnetic interference and lightning strikes.

The 777X family, which Boeing introduced more than a decade ago, includes two passenger planes, the 777-8 and 777-9, as well as a freighter, the 777-8F.

The first member of the family set to be delivered to customers, the 777-9, was stuck in unofficial test flights for four years.

Boeing started officially testing the 777-9 in July 2024 but faced another setback just one month later when inspectors found a crack in a structural component that connects the plane’s engine to the airframe.

Now, working a solution to the cracked thrust link, Boeing’s test fleet is running through a series of activities to achieve the FAA certification to deliver the new planes to customers and fly passengers.

CEO Kelly Ortberg told investors last month during Boeing’s quarterly earnings call that there are “no new technical issues” with the 777-9 test fleet. He’s optimistic about the plane, saying there has been “good progress so far, but we still have a lot of work to do.”

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] BREAKING NEWS - Air India 171 Interim Report Released [graphic] Mentour Now! ...

Eric — 7/11/2025 6:39:42 PM

BREAKING NEWS - Air India 171 Interim Report Released

Mentour Now!

Started streaming 36 minutes ago

Join Petter and Ben for this breaking news live stream, where we will be discussing Air India 171 and the shocking details from the interim report, that has just been released moments ago.

youtube.com

[John Koligman] I took a look at where these switches are, you apparently need to lift a lock a...

John Koligman — 7/11/2025 5:59:56 PM

I took a look at where these switches are, you apparently need to lift a lock and then activate them.

What Are Fuel Control Switches?In the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, fuel control switches marked as RUN and CUTOFF are used on the ground to start or shut down the engines. These switches are located below the throttle levers inside a fuel control module. Built-in brackets and metal stop locks are included to prevent accidental activation, requiring crew to lift the lock before changing the switch’s position.

[roto] Fuel switches cut off before Air India crash, preliminary report says [graphic]...

roto — 7/11/2025 4:45:07 PM

Fuel switches cut off before Air India crash, preliminary report says

Summary

The preliminary report into the Air India crash last month has been released - and casts attention on the actions of the pilots
Both fuel control switches - which are used to turn the engines off - were moved to the cut-off position, the report says
It says that in the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why he "did the cut-off". The other pilot, it says, responded that he did not do so
It is not specified which voice is which. At the time the aircraft took off, the co-pilot was flying the plane, while the captain was monitoring
At least 260 people were killed in the crash, the sole survivor - British national Vishwashkumar Ramesh - escaped the wreckage through an opening in the fuselage

Live Reporting
Edited by Nathan Williams and Johanna Chisholm

What else does the report say?published at 22:37
22:37
In its 15-page report, the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) says the wreckage site activities, including drone photography and videography, have been completed.

The wreckage itself has been moved to a secure area near the airport.

"Both engines were retrieved from the wreckage site and quarantined at a hangar in the airport," the report said.

"Components of interest for further examinations have been identified and quarantined," the report added.

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Report does not draw conclusions - but details provided on pilots' actionspublished at 22:30
22:30
Theo Leggett
BBC International Business Correspondent

The preliminary report from India’s Air Accident Investigation Bureau into the loss of Air India flight 171, which killed 260 people, has cast attention firmly on the actions of the pilots.

As we just reported, the report says that according to data from the flight recorder both the fuel control switches, which are normally used to switch the engines on or off when on the ground, were moved from the run to the cutoff position shortly after takeoff.

This caused both engines to lose thrust.

It says that in the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why he “did the cutoff”. The other pilot, it says, responded that he did not do so.

It is not specified which voice is which. At the time the aircraft took off, the co-pilot was flying the plane, while the captain was monitoring.

The switches were then moved back into their normal inflight position, something which would automatically start the process of relighting the engines.

One engine, according to the report, was in the process of regaining thrust at the time the aircraft crashed. The other was relit but was not yet regaining thrust.

The report says: "At this stage of investigation, there are no recommended actions to B787-8 and/or GE GEnx-1B engine operators and manufacturers, suggesting that no significant fault has been found with the plane or its engines."

The report does not draw any conclusions, and points out that the investigation is continuing, but it is clear attention is now being focused on the actions of the pilots.

Share
'Why did you cut off?' pilot heard in voice recording of cockpitpublished at 22:24
22:24Breaking
One of the findings from the report outlines how a pilot could be heard asking the other pilot in a voice recording of the cockpit in the moments before the crash: why did you cut off?

The report says that both engine fuel cut off switches were turned to "cut-off" with a time delay.

Below is an excerpt of that finding from the preliminary report:

"The aircraft achieved the maximum recorded airspeed of 180 Knots IAS at about 08:08:42 UTC and immediately thereafter, the Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec.

"The Engine N1 and N2 began to decrease from their take-off values as the fuel supply to the engines was cutoff.

"In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so."

bbc.com

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessLocal BusinessBoeing work instructions inadequate for ...

Eric — 7/11/2025 3:03:16 PM

Boeing work instructions inadequate for years before blowout, NTSB finds

July 10, 2025 at 4:38 pm

Unpainted 737 MAX aircraft are seen Sept. 24 at the Boeing plant in Renton. Federal accident investigators said Boeing and the FAA should have done better quality-control work before the blowout of a door panel on an Alaska Air 737 MAX aircraft in January 2024. (Lindsey Wasson / The Associated Press)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

The panel blowout aboard an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 was the result of more than four missing bolts, the National Transportation Safety Board reiterated in its final investigation report into the incident released Thursday.

The Jan. 5, 2024, blowout — which occurred shortly after the Alaska Airlines plane took off from Portland — happened because of long-term shortcomings at Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency tasked with overseeing the manufacturer’s quality and safety processes, the NTSB determined.

Because Boeing’s instructions for employees lacked “clarity and conciseness,” workers missed opportunities to note that the panel had been removed during the aircraft’s assembly, the NTSB said. The panel was incorrectly reinstalled but, without a record of the work being done, it was not reinspected and left the factory with four crucial bolts missing.

Boeing knew of the deficiencies in its work instructions for a decade, the NTSB said in its report, but both Boeing and the FAA failed to fix the flawed process.

The blame for the panel blowout, then, did not hang on the shoulders of workers who failed to install the four bolts that would have held the panel in place, but instead on Boeing and the FAA, the NTSB said.

The safety board has made these declarations before, including at a June hearing when board members discussed the results of the 18-month-long investigation. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said at that time that “an accident like this only happens when there are multiple system failures,” adding that the “deficiencies that led to this accident should have been evident” to Boeing and the FAA.

The final report released Thursday delves into more detail about what the NTSB found following months of interviews with Boeing and FAA employees, including where its record-keeping processes and work instructions for employees fell short.

What went wrong

On Jan. 5, 2024, on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, the first officer completed an external preflight walkaround and found nothing abnormal with the MAX 9, which had rolled out of Boeing’s Renton factory months before.

The flight’s taxi, takeoff and initial climb was uneventful, until the plane reached about 14,830 feet, when the cabin pressure suddenly dropped.

The captain heard flight attendants talking about a hole in the plane but, unable to communicate with one another, both the flight and cabin crews were uncertain about what had happened, the NTSB found.

The flight landed safely back in Portland, with some passengers and crew members reporting minor injuries. The left side of the plane had a hole that measured roughly 29 inches wide and 59 inches high. A seatback tray table, two seat headrests and nearby cabin interior panels were missing.

Months earlier, Boeing mechanics in the company’s Renton factory had removed that panel, known as a door plug because it fills a hole in the fuselage that can be used as an emergency exit for high-density seating aircraft.

Mechanics removed the panel to fix a problem with rivets. But, the NTSB found, none of the personnel working on the door plug generated a record that the panel had been removed.

Boeing mechanics then reinstalled the door plug, without four bolts meant to hold it in place. Because there was no removal record, no one conducted a final inspection to sign off that the door plug was reinstalled correctly.

After the plane was delivered to Alaska Airlines — without the bolts in place — the door plug slowly slid upwards, until, during Flight 1282, it moved far enough up to separate from stop fittings pinning it in place. The loosened plug then flew out of the airframe, leaving a hole in the side of the aircraft.

The four bolts meant to hold the door plug in place were never found, the NTSB said.

Missed chances

The NTSB determined that Boeing workers missed two opportunities to prompt a reinspection of the door plug after it had been removed and reinstalled.

Though both were needed to properly follow Boeing’s work processes, just one of the two could have prompted a second look and caught the missing bolts, preventing the near catastrophe.

Boeing’s procedures direct workers to generate a “removal record” to document what parts of the airplane they took off and what tasks are then needed to assure the parts are reinstalled correctly.

That removal record is required whenever there is a “disturbance of a previously accepted installation,” according to the NTSB’s report. In other words, whenever the removal would affect a job task that had already been inspected and approved. The removal would then require the earlier task be reinspected.

Related on alaska flight 1282

In one early discussion about the door plug, the NTSB learned that a senior manager told the door manager that “if removal (is) needed, a removal needs to (be) written first.”

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Still, the NTSB determined that neither the door team manager nor any of the door team personnel on duty had any experience opening a door plug, nor any knowledge of who actually performed the work. A removal record was not generated.

Separately, Boeing also incorporates a “short stamp process,” which is meant to document work that couldn’t be completed in its initial phase of production and therefore has to “travel” through the factory. A “stamp” indicates that a portion of the work has been completed.

In this case, Boeing’s postaccident review showed the short stamp process “did not clearly define the work remaining,” the NTSB said.

Though the short stamp process would not have negated the need for a removal record, it may have prompted a second look at the area and found that the bolts were missing, the NTSB said in its final report.

A systemic problem

The NTSB did not identify any individuals who worked on the removal and reinstallation of the door plug, and it’s not clear if the agency knows who performed those tasks.

But, the board made it clear in its final report that the incident was not the result of a single worker or group of workers who missed a crucial step in Boeing’s process. Instead, it was the result of a companywide problem that had long been identified.

It found that Boeing’s instructions for removal records “lacked clarity, conciseness and ease of use.”

The specific instructions for generating a removal record were more than 50 pages long, directed workers to other instructions and “provided more exceptions about when a removal record was not needed than direction indicating when it was,” the NTSB wrote in its report.

“Boeing lacked the comprehensive training and clear guidance needed to ensure that its … 737 door team personnel and others could consistently meet quality and safety standards,” the NTSB continued.

Boeing had been aware that its work instructions were not preparing employees to follow the removal process for at least 10 years, the agency determined. Those specific work instructions were referenced in 16 compliance issue reports to the FAA from 2018 to 2023, including instances of workers failing to generate a removal when it was required, the NTSB found.

Boeing had “substantively” revised the instructions 11 times between 2013 and 2023, but its proposed changes, which had been accepted by the FAA, were “ineffective,” the NTSB said. Furthermore, the FAA lacked the processes to keep track of discrepancies and nonconformances related to Boeing’s removal process.

A call for change

Boeing has since updated its instructions and training, including adding more training on when and why removal documentation is required.

Still, the NTSB said in its report that “effective guidance and recurrent training are critical” to ensure employees know what to do when a removal arises.

The NTSB, which does not have regulatory or enforcement authority, recommended Boeing update its on-the-job training to identify tasks that are necessary for manufacturing workers to be considered “fully qualified.”

That’s in part because the NTSB found that training for “nonroutine tasks,” including opening a door plug and generating a removal record, was not part of a structured program, leaving many workers unprepared.

The NTSB also recommended Boeing implement a grading system for its training program and develop a process to identify quality issues that result from human error, in order to prevent the same error from reoccurring.

When it comes to Boeing’s oversight, the NTSB said it was “encouraged by the FAA’s initial progress” but recommended the agency revise its compliance enforcement system, audit activity and record-keeping system.

It also recommended that the FAA convene an independent panel to review Boeing’s safety culture.

In response to the NTSB’s recommendations first publicized at the June hearing, the FAA said it has “fundamentally changed how it oversees Boeing … and we will continue this aggressive oversight to ensure Boeing fixes its systemic production-quality issues.”

A Boeing spokesperson said Thursday the company would ” review the final report and recommendations as we continue to implement improvements.”

“We at Boeing regret this accident and continue to work on strengthening safety and quality across our operations,” the spokesperson said.

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.

seattletimes.com

[roto] Boeing's 787 Dreamliner was deemed the 'safest' of planes. The whistleblowers we...

roto — 6/30/2025 7:48:34 AM

Boeing's 787 Dreamliner was deemed the 'safest' of planes. The whistleblowers were always less sure

Published29 June 2025

bbc.co.uk

Theo Leggett
International Business Correspondent

Listen to Theo reading this article

The Air India tragedy, in which at least 270 people died, involved one of Boeing's most innovative and popular planes. Until now, it was considered one of its safest too.

We still do not know why flight 171 crashed just 30 seconds after take-off. Investigators have now recovered flight recorder data and are working hard to find out. But the incident has drawn attention to the aircraft involved: the 787 Dreamliner, the first of a modern generation of radical, fuel-efficient planes.

Prior to the accident, the 787 had operated for nearly a decade and a half without any major accidents and without a single fatality. During that period, according to Boeing, it carried more than a billion passengers. There are currently more than 1,100 in service worldwide.

.

[Eric] Boeing & AerospaceBusinessBoeing ‘rolled out’ 38 MAX planes in May, reaching FAA...

Eric — 6/10/2025 1:08:41 PM

Boeing ‘rolled out’ 38 MAX planes in May, reaching FAA production cap

June 10, 2025 at 8:00 am Updated June 10, 2025 at 8:00 am

737 MAX aircraft are seen in various states of assembly at the Boeing 737 factory June 25 in Renton. (Jennifer Buchanan / The Seattle Times)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

Boeing delivered 45 airplanes in May and booked 303 gross orders, its largest monthly order count since December 2023.

The bulk of those orders came from Qatar Airways, which signed a deal for 120 787 planes and 30 777Xs during President Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East last month. That deal marked the largest ever order for Boeing widebody planes and for the 787, the company said Tuesday in its monthly report of orders and deliveries.

Boeing’s May deliveries match its output for the first five months of the year, including 45 deliveries in April and January, with the surrounding months all ringing in above 40 planes per month.

In May, Boeing marked a separate milestone by increasing monthly production of the 737 MAX to 38 planes, reaching the Federal Aviation Administration’s production cap for the first time since it was put in place. The FAA limited Boeing’s 737 MAX production, after a panel flew off an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 in January 2024, hoping to ensure Boeing would slow its factories as it focused on quality and safety over production pace.

Boeing “rolled out” 38 737 MAX planes last month, the company confirmed Tuesday, meaning it moved 38 planes through its production line and out of the factory. Not all of those 38 planes have been delivered to customers.

Boeing would now need to secure permission from the FAA to move above the 38 per month production threshold, something that will be crucial to generating more cash and a sign of the company’s recovery since the panel blowout.

CEO Kelly Ortberg has said Boeing hopes to seek that permission this year but won’t do so until it’s sure it is still meeting key performance indicators it identified with the FAA as part of its safety and quality plan after the Alaska Airlines incident.

Of the 45 planes delivered in May, 32 were from the 737 family, including 31 MAXs and one 737 NG delivered to Boeing’s defense program for the P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft.

Boeing also delivered seven 787s widebody planes, five 777 freighters and one 767 freighter.

From January through the end of May, Boeing delivered 220 planes, including 167 737 jets, 28 787s, 16 777s and nine 767s.

In the same time period last year, as it was still reeling from the Alaska Airlines incident, Boeing delivered 131planes.

So far this year, Boeing has booked 552 gross orders. Adjusting for 40 cancellations and strict accounting principles, Boeing’s net orders through the end of May totaled 606.

In addition to Qatar Airway’s order for 120 787 planes and 30 777Xs, Boeing booked seven 787s orders in May, listed as an unidentified customer.

It also booked 146 orders for the 737 MAX, including 20 for AviLease, seven for WestJet and 119 for unidentified customers.

It’s difficult to compare Boeing’s May orders to those of its European rival Airbus, which reported zero orders last month but is thought to be delaying its announcements for next week’s Paris Air Show. Airlines and manufacturers have historically used the annual air show to announce large, splashy deals.

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When it comes to deliveries, Airbus slightly outpaced Boeing, delivering 51 airplanes in May, to 32 customers, compared to Boeing’s 45.

In the first five months of the year, Airbus delivered 243 planes to 61 customers, compared to Boeing’s 220.

Boeing’s backlog grew from 5,643 planes at the end of April to 5,943 as of May 31.

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.

seattletimes.com

[longz] In a letter to a senior U.S. lawmaker, Ryanair's chief executive Michael O'Leary...

longz — 5/2/2025 2:59:26 PM

In a letter to a senior U.S. lawmaker, Ryanair's chief executive Michael O'Leary said Trump's tariffs could threaten 330 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that his airline has on order, which have a list price of more than $30 billion.

Ryanair could 'reassess' $30B Boeing order after U.S. pressure over COMAC | Fortune Asia

[Eric] [graphic] ChatGPT generated panoramic image of the COMAC C919 aircraft landing a...

Eric — 4/24/2025 12:21:40 PM

ChatGPT generated panoramic image of the COMAC C919 aircraft landing at an airport

How COMAC Might Leverage Europe to Secure Aerospace Independence from the U.S.

13 hours ago

Michael Barnard

15 Comments

Sign up for CleanTechnica's Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott's in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and/or follow us on Google News!

Last Updated on: 24th April 2025, 03:52 am

China’s equivalent to Boeing and Airbus, COMAC, faces a critical strategic inflection point, driven by intensifying geopolitical tensions and a trade war that the second Trump presidency intentionally added significant accelerant to. While China’s intent to compete with Boeing and Airbus through the C919 narrow body and the upcoming C929 wide body remains clear, the longstanding reliance on American aerospace components poses significant vulnerabilities. China has been following a domestic aerospace manufacturing competency strategy for 15 years, but the Trump trade war with its 145% tariffs on China and tariffs on every other country—except Russia—both multiply the risk and open opportunities.

This strategic assessment is triggered by my recent evaluation of the implications of China’s shutting down of domestic purchases of US passenger planes. My assessment dealt with the long decline of Boeing and its regulatory capture of the FAA, something I’d thought through in print before, but was viewing through the lens of a China attacked by Trump’s tariffs and responding in a multi-faceted way. Another lever China has pulled is licensing of critical minerals for export, requiring end country and use case to be clearly stated, with the obvious implication that things that benefit the USA would not receive approval. Among other things, this impacts US jet turbine manufacturing. On a different track, China has stopped buying US LNG, putting all final investment decisions on US LNG port proposals on even thinner ice. In the same vein, Trump’s extraordinary tariffs mean that the rest of the world, and especially Europe, have the opportunity to reduce their transformer delivery timelines, diverting Chinese export capacity that would have otherwise gone to the USA.

The piece about Boeing sales shut down resulted in a lot of remarks from US commenters who seemed somewhat divorced from the reality of China’s technological, R&D and aerospace advances. Among other things, they asserted that China couldn’t make jet engines or avionics. This struck me as both remarkably improbable, and as most likely an indication of western chauvinism regarding China’s technical competence and strategic foresight. Investigation ensued.

This piece is of a kind with my recent strategic projection of the rest of the world’s potential strategic shifts around Chinese semiconductors, with the fragile US-led blockade on China developing or acquiring the most advanced chips fracturing under the weight of US hostility to its allies. It’s been fascinating picking apart the geopolitical threads and considering how they might end up being rewoven. I’ll be speaking about some of that related to critical minerals to a global audience of institutional investors through Jefferies investment bank soon, along with a host of speakers I feel privileged to be among. But back to China’s domestic aerospace strategy.

Historically, COMAC has followed a careful, methodical strategy, collaborating extensively with global aerospace suppliers—including American giants such as GE Aviation, Honeywell, Collins Aerospace, and Parker Hannifin—to gradually build domestic aviation expertise. Engines, avionics, flight controls, and auxiliary systems have heavily leveraged U.S. technology, along with European OEMs. Though substantial progress has been made domestically—most notably with the CJ-1000A engine, China’s homegrown alternative to the CFM LEAP-1C engine—the pace has remained incremental rather than transformational.

Now, as geopolitical pressure intensifies, it’s likely COMAC will pivot toward Europe as its primary near-term strategic partner. European aerospace firms already deeply involved in COMAC programs—including Safran, Liebherr Aerospace, Thales, and Rolls-Royce—represent the logical bridge away from the U.S. market. European suppliers provide comparable technological capability, combined crucially with the credibility needed to maintain global market access via EASA certification pathways. The strategic calculus is straightforward: Europe, increasingly frustrated by America’s trade policies and technology export restrictions, will likely view expanded cooperation with China in aerospace as both politically palatable and commercially advantageous.

Under this scenario, COMAC would begin aggressively seeking European replacements for critical American-sourced aircraft systems. Safran, already a major participant in COMAC’s existing supply chain, would be the natural first port of call to substitute wheels, brakes, and possibly even auxiliary power units currently sourced from Honeywell. Safran’s extensive aviation credentials and EASA familiarity would expedite certification. Thales would likely step in to replace core avionics components and navigation systems traditionally sourced from Collins Aerospace and GE Aviation. Given Thales’ broad aerospace and defense expertise, this transition would also be eased by existing regulatory frameworks in Europe.

Similarly, Liebherr Aerospace, deeply embedded already in COMAC’s landing gear and environmental control systems, could readily expand into flight-control actuators, hydraulic systems, and fuel systems currently sourced from Parker Hannifin. Liebherr’s established joint ventures within China mean technology transfer and local production would not face major regulatory hurdles, creating a smoother pathway to full system integration.

On the engine front, while China continues to push the development of the CJ-1000A for the C919, COMAC may still consider interim measures involving European engines from Safran or Rolls-Royce, particularly if the CJ-1000A’s full EASA certification faces delays or difficulties. For the larger CR929 widebody, Rolls-Royce engines, such as the Trent 7000 series, would be strategically appealing as a non-American option capable of immediate global market acceptance. This European engine selection would not only ensure timely availability for early CR929 variants but would also enhance the credibility required for expedited EASA approvals.

This European pivot would simultaneously advance COMAC’s long-term goal of total aerospace self-sufficiency. By collaborating more closely with European firms, COMAC would acquire critical expertise through targeted technology transfer and joint ventures strategically positioned within China. These joint ventures, operating under clear localization mandates, would lay a foundation for eventual domestic substitution. European aerospace companies, motivated by market access and frustrated with U.S. trade practices, would likely find such terms commercially attractive enough to justify the risks inherent in technology sharing.

Moreover, COMAC would pursue a careful and deliberate certification strategy emphasizing cooperation with EASA. Given the increasingly unlikely prospect of FAA approval under ongoing U.S.-China tensions and the FAA regulatory capture by Boeing, EASA certification becomes pivotal. A certification by EASA would unlock global market opportunities beyond China, particularly in regions like Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, all of which typically recognize EASA’s regulatory authority without significant additional scrutiny, and don’t have a phobia about China baked into their national DNA. Countries closely aligned with U.S. regulatory frameworks—such as Canada, Japan, and South Korea—might remain hesitant, but the global reach afforded by EASA validation still represents substantial market potential. Notably, all three of those countries have been subject to new tariffs, demands, and in Canada’s case, the threat of annexation, so their openness to non-US alternatives and strategies has increased.

Japan, for example, recently left the the USA without a trade deal, saying that they weren’t even able to get a straight answer about what the country wanted out of a negotiation, and certainly weren’t going to buy 100 year, zero interest bonds. I assessed the weird sane-washing of Trump’s tariffs that’s underway among talking heads and Republican propagandists recently, and found no actually intelligent and educated person not attached to Trump’s inner circle who thought Stephen Miran’s Mar a Lago Accord concept remotely credible or viable, so was unsurprised Japan wasn’t tempted by the zero-yield century bonds.

Strategically, COMAC would also seek to mitigate the risks of a newly created dependence on European suppliers. Anticipating future geopolitical uncertainties, COMAC would likely structure supplier arrangements to minimize vulnerability. This would include diversifying European sources—leveraging suppliers from multiple countries in Europe to avoid single-nation dependency—and accelerating parallel domestic development efforts for critical components. By doing so, COMAC positions itself to manage potential disruptions or policy shifts, ensuring operational resilience in the long run. What will Europe seek to gain from this, and can it deal with China’s strategic corporate and national game playing? I’m not sure. I’ll keep thinking about it.

In the near term, one to two years, COMAC could be delivering 100% US component free planes to China’s domestic market and potentially foreign markets. By 2028 to 2029, COMAC would be delivering 100% domestic Chinese planes to domestic markets and working through international certification through EASA. By 2035, China could reasonably be delivering airplanes that were 100% Chinese made internationally in both narrow body and wide body form factors, displacing Boeing in all of the markets that the United States has been attacking, and competing with Airbus, which has been leaving Boeing in its contrails in recent years. America loses in any scenario.

Ultimately, this strategy would not merely be about immediate decoupling from U.S. aerospace technology but about carefully orchestrated strategic alignment with Europe, grounded in mutual interest. Both sides stand to benefit: COMAC secures immediate production continuity and global certification credibility, while European aerospace firms gain market opportunities previously limited by American dominance. This alignment, although inherently temporary, would buy COMAC critical time—likely five to ten years—to fully develop and mature domestic aerospace technologies. Long-term, the clear objective remains complete aviation independence, with COMAC’s eventual aim of producing aircraft fully equipped with domestically engineered and manufactured engines, avionics, and auxiliary systems.

This pivot is more than just a tactical maneuver—it’s a recognition that China’s aerospace aspirations require deeper global partnerships, a strategic step on the path toward eventual aerospace independence. The speculative strategy outlined here would position COMAC not simply as a victim of escalating geopolitical pressures but as a proactive player leveraging shifting alliances to build a robust and globally competitive aerospace industry capable of operating sustainably outside the American technological and regulatory sphere.

cleantechnica.com

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Business Boeing, aerospace suppliers primed for disruption a...

Eric — 4/12/2025 10:53:06 AM

Boeing & Aerospace
Business

Boeing, aerospace suppliers primed for disruption amid Trump’s tariffs

April 12, 2025 at 6:00 am Updated April 12, 2025 at 6:01 am

A 787-9 and a 777 share a bay at the Boeing Everett Production Facility on June 26 in Everett. (Jennifer Buchanan / The Seattle Times)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

Boeing, its suppliers and the Seattle-area aerospace industry are in for a bumpy ride as they navigate President Donald Trump’s turbulent trade war.

Scott Hamilton, an aerospace analyst with Leeham News and Analysis, visualized the tariffs as a dark storm cloud hanging over the industry and, particularly, its key U.S. manufacturer: Boeing.

“It’s just a thunderstorm and all we’re doing is waiting for the lightning strikes,” Hamilton said.

The aerospace industry, like so many other economic sectors, has been anticipating some fallout from the Trump administration’s new tariffs.

In the worst-case scenario, the tariffs, essentially taxes on goods imported into the U.S., could increase the cost of airplane parts and the finished product, disrupt the industry’s extensive supply chain and lower demand if the U.S. dips into a recession. Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said on a call with investors this week that it’s already seeing a dip in bookings.

For those companies tasked with making the plane — from manufacturers like Boeing to engine-makers to those businesses that make nuts, bolts and fasteners — it could take months to change suppliers, industry analysts said. The fragile supply chain is still recovering from the COVID pandemic.

Some analysts expect the effects of Trump’s tariffs could be minimal thanks to a large backlog of inventory, but others worry one kink in the supply chain could have rippling effects.

In the meantime, Hamilton said, the uncertainty about what Trump will do and how other countries may respond is enough to kick off the disruption so many are worried about.

“No business — whether it’s Boeing or (Brazilian plane manufacturer) Embraer or the mom-and-pop shop — no business can make planes with that kind of uncertainty hanging over their heads,” Hamilton said.

Could consumers see the impact?

After announcing sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries, Trump paused most of them hours after they went into effect Wednesday. He still implemented a 10% blanket tariff and raised the tax on goods imported from China to a total of 145%.

China, a key market for Boeing’s planes, on Friday announced it would raise its own tariffs on U.S. goods from 84% to 125%.

In February, Trump also announced a 25% tariff on aluminum and steel, two of the main metals used to build aircraft.

Trump claims the tariffs will bring more manufacturing and jobs to the United States, but economists warn they will raise prices and could spark a recession. Many in the aerospace industry worry they could increase the cost of airplanes and airplane parts because manufacturing in China, Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia is less expensive than doing the same work in the United States.

“If you’re reshoring to the U.S., … you’re going to see an increase in costs,” said Mark Norton, the executive director of the Northwest I-90 Manufacturing Alliance, which works to help manufacturers along Washington and Idaho’s I-90 corridor.

“Somebody’s going to have to eat that (cost), and I don’t think it’s going to be” large manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus, Norton said. “That’s going to trickle to the consumer.”

The industry isn’t used to navigating tariffs. It’s been operating mostly duty-free for decades after a 1980 trade agreement. In March, a group of 15 aviation groups asked federal officials to consider an aerospace exception from the tariffs to minimize the disruption to the supply chain.

What’s at stake for Boeing?

Boeing expects it will have some cushion to soften the immediate blow of the tariffs. It has a large inventory of airplane parts and a large backlog of airplane orders, giving Boeing suppliers and customers flexibility, Chief Financial Officer Brian West said at a Bank of America conference last month.

Brian West, Boeing chief financial officer. (Courtesy of Boeing)

Boeing buys 80% of the components it needs to build commercial planes from U.S. sources, and 90% of its military spending is based in the U.S., West said. Most of its aluminum and steel is also from the U.S., he continued.

“We think we’ve got enough room to breathe,” he said.

But Boeing could still feel the impacts of a disrupted supply chain. Airplane parts could be delayed, “stuck sitting at borders or held in strategic facilities,” analysts from RBC Capital Markets wrote in an investor note this week.

West acknowledged at the conference in March that “what we do worry about is availability of parts because this is a broad, complicated supply chain and people have different levels of exposure to it.” To mitigate the impact, West said “we’re working like heck to stay close to our suppliers.”

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If Boeing’s suppliers and, consequently Boeing, have to raise prices, the manufacturer risks losing ground to European rival Airbus, though analysts are split on how likely it is that airline customers switch their orders due to the tariffs.

Aengus Kelly, the CEO of aircraft lessor AerCap, said in a March CNBC interview that he expected a 25% tariff would raise the cost of Boeing’s 787 by $40 million.

“Customers won’t take it,” Kelly said. “The airlines will say ‘We can’t afford the airplane. We’ll call Airbus.’ ”

In the worst-case scenario, that would leave Boeing with the U.S. market, about 20% to 25% of the global market, and “Airbus will end up with the rest of the world,” Kelly said.

Hamilton, from Leeham News, said Boeing has three times more aircraft subject to tariffs than Airbus, which has a factory in Mobile, Ala. Airbus only has to worry about tariffs on products heading to the U.S., while Boeing has to worry about all of its international customers.

Hamilton predicts Airbus will deliver 793 planes to U.S. customers during Trump’s time in office. Boeing, on the other hand, will deliver 2,170 planes to global customers.

The tariffs could also affect Boeing’s march to recovery as it works to restore its reputation and production rate after an in-flight safety incident in January 2024 and recover from a two-month Machinists strike in the fall. Boeing has spent the past year making changes to its production process and culture.

Now, “none of this helps Boeing’s recovery,” Hamilton said.

More about the tariffs

Matthew Akers, an analyst from Wells Fargo, had a more optimistic view. Boeing is in “good shape” to weather this, he said, noting that it can rely on a $21 billion stock sale in October to provide some financial cushion and temporarily prop up suppliers if needed.

Akers was concerned about the possibility of tariffs disrupting the supply chain or sparking a recession that would ultimately lower demand but didn’t expect the levies to increase the cost of Boeing’s planes.

Only 10% to 15% of Boeing’s expenses are exposed to tariffs, Akers estimated in an April investor note, leading to a 2%-3% cost increase for most aircraft. That’s not enough of an incentive for airlines to switch manufacturers and risk a delay in delivery, Akers said in an interview.

“If you’re an airline somewhere in the world, are you going to cancel and get in line at Airbus?” he said. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

Will the China feud disrupt the industry?

Even if the 90-day pause on tariffs for most countries will ease some strain on the aerospace industry, the escalating trade war with China will take a toll.

China is the “next biggest single market” for Boeing after the U.S., Hamilton from Leehman News said. China’s airlines once operated more MAX planes than their U.S. competitors did. That relationship changed after tariffs instituted during Trump’s first administration and deadly MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019.

Now, Hamilton estimates China’s airlines have somewhere between 140 and 200 orders for Boeing planes scheduled through 2027. Boeing’s website lists 130 unfilled orders slated to go to China, and analysts predict a chunk of Boeing’s 762 unidentified orders are also headed there.

Akers, from Wells Fargo, said Boeing may “shuffle” its deliveries, hoping to delay fulfilling those orders headed to China until there is more clarity on the tariffs, or, ideally, some relief. China’s Juneyao Airlines is reportedly delaying delivery of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner due to the tariffs, Bloomberg reported Friday.

What about Washington’s economy?

With roughly 77,400 workers — accounting for $11.3 billion in wages and generating $57 billion in business revenue in 2023 — the aerospace industry is considered by those in it to be the backbone of Washington’s economy.

Boeing accounts for 80% of those jobs and 82% of industrywide revenue, according to a 2024 report from the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. But Washington’s aerospace supply chain includes companies — small and large — whose work ranges from engineering to research to maintenance to crafting tooling, interiors and composites.

The Pacific Northwest Aerospace Alliance, a nonprofit that supports aerospace companies in the region, estimates there are 500 companies directly tied to the aerospace supply chains in Washington.

Those smaller suppliers are likely to feel the greatest effects of the tariffs, said Norton, from the Northwest I-90 Manufacturing Alliance.

“The Boeings and the Amazons of the world can look at alternatives for their supply chain. Small and medium businesses … they don’t have the resources to go out and find other suppliers,” Norton said.

On top of that, the region and the nation don’t have the skilled workforce they would need to deliver on Trump’s goal of bringing more manufacturing jobs to the United States, Norton said. The aerospace industry has already struggled to train the next generation of labor needed to meet demand.

But Norton said some local companies might benefit from the tariffs. It could give them a cost advantage over international rivals and it would give domestic companies extra incentive to hire U.S.-based companies.

Norton said at least one unnamed supplier has already fielded inquiries about their capacity to take on new work.

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Business As FAA limit on MAX production lingers, Boeing watc...

Eric — 3/22/2025 9:29:51 AM

Boeing & Aerospace
Business

As FAA limit on MAX production lingers, Boeing watchers aren’t worried

March 22, 2025 at 6:00 am Updated March 22, 2025 at 6:00 am

The iconic split wing of the 737 MAX is seen on a plane being assembled on March 9, 2023 in Renton. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times Amazon reporter

Federal safety regulators have capped production of Boeing’s most popular plane, the 737 MAX, for more than a year, following a panel blowout that raised concerns about the manufacturer.

The cap, which holds production at Boeing’s Renton factory to 38 MAX planes a month, doesn’t appear to be loosening any time soon.

Visiting that factory last week, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the cap is staying in place, even as government officials, Boeing executives and industry analysts say they are seeing the quality and safety improvements they sought after the in-flight blowout on Jan. 5, 2024.

“We have committed to tough love for Boeing,” Duffy said in a video posted to X after his Renton visit. “Once they get their act together, and are producing high-quality aircraft, we’re going to do our job … and give them a little more flexibility. But right now, we’re not there yet.”

Boeing MAX deliveries over the years

Production of the 737 MAX plane has been marred by crisis since its first delivery in 2017, including two plane crashes, one panel blowout and a Machinists strike in 2024.

Source: Boeing company data (Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)

Boeing hasn’t asked regulators to lift the cap and hasn’t yet reached the threshold of producing 38 MAX planes per month, but Chief Financial Officer Brian West has said the company hopes to reach that rate later this year and then seek approval to go higher.

The cap — an unprecedented move by the Federal Aviation Administration, a part of the Department of Transportation — was another setback for the airplane model that has been plagued by crashes, pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions and a Machinists strike.

But industry analysts aren’t worried after a year of stunted production.

All Boeing has to do now is “more of the same,” said Jefferies analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu, who recently visited Boeing’s South Carolina factory where it produces the 787 widebody plane. Though they’re different production lines, Boeing has focused its efforts on improving quality and safety across its factories.

In South Carolina, Kahyaoglu said, Boeing made it easier to find tools and access instructional videos to get questions answered rather than relying on co-workers. The company also implemented new software to track work done on the planes with unique 20-digit codes that include the factory location, work station and task performed.

“Yes, Secretary Duffy made those comments,” Kahyaoglu said. “But we’ve seen significant improvement.”

Boeing launched the 737 MAX — an update to its earlier 737 model with larger engines — in 2011 to compete with rival Airbus’ A320neo jet.

The plane quickly became its most popular and, still today, “there’s no limit in demand,” said Joseph Phillips, a business professor at Seattle University.

Because it is Boeing’s main moneymaker, the FAA’s production cap on the MAX can significantly affect Boeing’s finances.

That’s particularly important this year, as Boeing struggles to rein in expensive defense contracts, recover from a Machinists strike that halted production for two months and dig out from regulatory scrutiny following the panel blowout.

“The cash flow of selling planes is obviously very material to their financial health,” Phillips said. “Not being able to put more planes out the door and ship them to customers just makes it harder to come back.”

After first delivering the plane in 2017, the MAX production lines ground to a halt following two tragic crashes months apart.

In October 2018, a MAX 8 crashed shortly after takeoff in Indonesia, killing 189 people. In March 2019, another MAX 8 crashed in Ethiopia, killing 157 people. Investigators later determined an error in a new software system on the MAX caused both aircraft to nosedive.

The MAX was grounded until November 2020.

As Boeing worked to recover from the grounding, the COVID pandemic disrupted the aerospace supply chain, leading to further production delays.

By 2023, Boeing’s then-CEO Dave Calhoun was optimistic about the MAX’s future, setting a goal to surpass 2019 production levels.

But in January 2024, a panel blew off a MAX 9 shortly after it took off from Portland, reigniting scrutiny of the manufacturer and leading the FAA to cap MAX production at 38 planes per month.

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Boeing spent the past year working on a safety and quality plan submitted to the FAA, and steadily increasing production.

Boeing’s 737 MAX deliveries in 2024

Boeing slowed production in its factories at the start of 2024, after a panel blew off a 737 MAX plane midflight. The company has yet to reach the Federal Aviation Administration’s production cap of 38 MAX planes per month. The number of deliveries doesn’t necessarily equal the number of planes produced that month; some planes that were delivered had been mostly complete already.

Source: Boeing company data (Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)

In September, its ramp-up was put on hold when its Machinists workforce went on a two-month strike, halting nearly all work in the factories. Boeing restarted MAX production in December, after a pause to focus on training and certification after the strike.

This year, Boeing’s production increase continued. The company delivered 40 MAX planes in January and 31 in February, according to company data. Those numbers include deliveries of nearly done planes in storage that were handed over to buyers.

Boeing CFO West said at a Bank of America conference Wednesday that the company is making progress.

“The success factors for Boeing this year were always going to be about safety, quality and stability. And so far, we’re off to a pretty good start on all three dimensions,” West said. “The factory looks fantastic.”

“We can’t wait till, when we show stability over the course of time, that we’re then going to then be allowed to move up to higher rates beyond 38,” he continued.

After his visit to the Renton factory, Duffy said in a Fox News interview that determining when to lift the cap isn’t “an exact science.”

“It’s a bit of an art,” Duffy said. “You have to make sure the quality is there.”

“Once they do that,” he continued, “we have to take a risk on them and we’re going to have to increase the number of planes they produce.

“I’m looking forward to that day. When it’s going to come, I can’t tell you.”

Kahyaoglu, from Jefferies, isn’t worried about the cap remaining in place. The firm has already forecast production rates will stay at or below 38 MAX planes per month through December.

“It’ll be more of a continuous process,” Kahyaoglu said. “If they’re hitting these metrics and doing it safely, it will be more of a nonissue.”

Ron Epstein, an analyst with Bank of America, similarly said Boeing has some cushion before the capped production severely affects its finances. But, while it won’t mean anything dire for the company if the production cap remains, it could delay other investments, like Boeing’s highly anticipated next new airplane.

“It’s been more difficult for them to clean up their balance sheet,” Epstein said.

The news on Friday that Boeing won a contract to build the U.S. Air Force’s future fighter jet could bring some relief, Epstein said. But that depends on the terms of the contract; Boeing is losing money on several contracts it entered into during President Donald Trump’s first term.

“If their defense business is doing better, it would soften the impact of the MAX” production slowdown, Epstein said. “Right now, since they’re both not doing great, there’s nothing to soften the blow.”

Epstein doesn’t expect the end of the FAA’s production cap will happen neatly. Rather than lifting it entirely, he predicted an incremental change, adding two, four or six new planes at each consideration.

“I imagine from a quality perspective, there’s some stability they want to see,” Epstein said. “There’s no incentive for the FAA to be aggressive with it.”

Phillips, from Seattle University, agreed that the FAA will be cautious with its decision.

“They don’t want to look back and say, ‘We let them start increasing planes earlier than we should have,’ ” Phillips said. “The government, everything else being equal, wants Boeing to be a successful company in the long run.”

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com.

seattletimes.com

[John Koligman] Trump’s Tariffs Could Deal a Blow to Boeing and the Aerospace Industry Aerospace...

John Koligman — 3/19/2025 12:40:56 PM

Trump’s Tariffs Could Deal a Blow to Boeing and the Aerospace Industry
Aerospace companies are big exporters but also very reliant on a global supply chain, making them vulnerable.

Boeing’s factory in Everett, Wash. Tariffs on aluminum and steel, two of the most important raw materials in making an aircraft, are expected to add to manufacturing costs in the long run.Credit...Lindsey Wasson for The New York Times

By Niraj Chokshi

March 19, 2025Updated 11:34 a.m. ET

Boeing is the kind of manufacturer — one that exports billions of dollars of goods — that President Trump says he wants to protect and nurture.

But his tariffs could have the opposite effect on the company’s suppliers.

Mr. Trump has imposed a few tariffs so far, but he says more are coming in just a few weeks. That threat has unnerved the aerospace industry, of which Boeing is one of the largest companies. Duties on aluminum and steel, two of the most important raw materials used in aircraft, are expected to raise manufacturing costs. But the industry is far more concerned by tariffs that take effect on goods from Canada and Mexico next month, which could disrupt the highly integrated North American supply chain.

“These tariffs are particularly fraught for an industry like aerospace that has been duty-free for decades,” said Bruce Hirsh, a trade policy expert at Capitol Counsel, a lobbying firm in Washington, which has aerospace clients. “Parts are coming from everywhere.”

Aerospace experts say the industry is an example of U.S. manufacturing prowess. It offers well-paying jobs and has produced one of the largest trade surpluses of any industry for years. Aerospace is expected to export about $125 billion this year, according to IBISWorld, second only to oil and gas.

But the industry is operating under a cloud of uncertainty. Many companies have been able to avoid costly cross-border tariffs under a short-term reprieve for products covered by a North American trade agreement that Mr. Trump negotiated in his first term. But that deal expires in April.

In a letter to administration officials last week, groups representing airlines, plane repair stations, suppliers and manufacturers asked for an exception to the tariffs, arguing that it was needed to keep the industry competitive on the global market.

For Boeing, the tariffs would come at a difficult moment. The company spent the past year recovering from a crisis that started when a panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max jet during a flight in January 2024. There were no casualties, but the incident exposed shortcomings and prompted intense scrutiny from regulators. The company replaced its chief executive and began overhauling its operations.

After months of turmoil, including a nearly two-month strike, Boeing has steadily increased production of the Max, its best-selling jet, and other planes. But the tariffs could hurt the companies that supply it and other aerospace manufacturers. Aluminum makes up about three-fourths of the contents of the Max. Steel accounts for a much smaller but still substantial share.

The direct effects of the tariffs on Boeing will be limited, Brian West, the company’s chief financial officer, said at an investor conference on Wednesday. The company has a lot of inventory on hand and the company’s spending is already overwhelmingly concentrated in the United States. In addition, a rise in metal prices would amount to a less than 1 percent increase in the costs of making planes, he said.

But the tariffs could take a toll on companies further down the aerospace supply chain, which have struggled for years with material and labor shortages.

“What we do worry about is availability of parts because this is a broad complicated supply chain and people have different levels of exposure to it,” Mr. West said.

A factory in Tlaxcala, Mexico, exports manufactured stainless steel wire, aluminum, nickel alloys and solders to U.S. companies, including the aerospace industry.Credit...Hector Lorenzo/Reuters

In all, the tariffs could raise costs for the aerospace industry by about $5 billion annually, said Kevin Michaels, a managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory, a consulting firm. A vast majority of that would come from the tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico. And the threat of a trade war would only compound the consequences.

“Not only are the country tariffs bigger, but countries can retaliate,” Mr. Michaels said. “And, boy, is Canada mad.”

Last month, Éric Martel, the president and chief executive of Bombardier, a major manufacturer of corporate jets based in Montreal, told investors that the company was suspending its financial projections for the year because the tariffs — and possible retaliatory tariffs — “could have an enormous impact” on the industry. Parts of Boeing’s 787 and 777 jets are built in Canada, which is also home to CAE, a leading manufacturer of flight simulators. Pratt & Whitney makes engines for helicopters and other aircraft in Quebec.

Mexico is also home to many suppliers, big and small. Collins Aerospace, Honeywell Aerospace and GE Aerospace design or produce components for commercial and business jets there.

If tariffs are imposed, analysts said, moving that production to the United States would be difficult, if not impossible.

“That’s going to take an awful long time to happen, if in fact it ever does,” Jerrold Lundquist, an industry consultant, said. “There’s fundamental economics as to why that supply chain is distributed in the first place. It’s usually labor costs, but also material availability and things like that.”

The industry operates on long time horizons — planes take years to design and months to make and are typically used for decades — so decisions to move operations are not made lightly. There aren’t enough skilled aerospace workers in the United States, and suppliers have struggled for years to hire enough workers.

In a report to Congress in November, a coalition representing the industry, workers and safety experts concluded that the “aerospace supply chain is vulnerable to labor shortages, obstacles in critical materials and the health of supporting infrastructure.”

Even the threat of an escalation in trade tensions is hurting aerospace manufacturers, industry experts said.

“The strategic decisions in a lot of cases are frozen as a result of this,” Mr. Michaels said.

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Boeing finishes 787 repairs, closing Everett ‘shadow factory...

Eric — 3/1/2025 11:45:13 AM

Boeing & Aerospace

Boeing finishes 787 repairs, closing Everett ‘shadow factory’

Feb. 28, 2025 at 6:01 pm

This week, Boeing rolled out the last of the 122 airplanes that had been stored for rework of small fuselage gaps. The last was a 787-10 that Boeing flew on test flights for its ecoDemonstrator program in 2023. With those tests complete, it was stored again until repair. It will now be repainted for delivery to TAAG Angola Airlines. (Boeing)

By
Dominic Gates
Seattle Times aerospace reporter

In a significant milestone toward Boeing’s recovery, mechanics in Everett this week completed rework on the last of the 787 Dreamliner jets that had to be stored long-term until small gaps at the fuselage joins were repaired, Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stephanie Pope announced.

This marks the end of a long, expensive slog to fix 122 Dreamliners that has locked up the time of hundreds of mechanics, taking them away from regular jet-production work.

The paper-thin gaps were determined not to be a risk to the structural integrity of the airplanes but nevertheless did not meet the manufacturing specification and kept the aircraft from being delivered to airline customers.

The financially draining rework, requiring meticulous disassembly then reassembly of the aircraft, has spanned five years.

Other teams of mechanics are still reworking 737 MAXs in storage, of which about 55 remained at the end of January.

Boeing has referred to the 787 and MAX rework projects as “shadow factories,” because they take workers away from the main assembly plants. Chief Financial Officer Brian West said last month he expected to close out both this year, immediately improving profit margins.

Writing on LinkedIn on Friday, Pope said the mechanics who completed the 787 work will now move onto new assignments, “with many of them helping us advance the 777/777X program.”

“This is what we mean when we said we would shut down the ‘shadow factories’ and turn our full attention to building all-new airplanes,” Pope said.

Though the completion of the fuselage-gap rework is a positive milestone, other slowdowns in the jet-production system remain.

A separate inventory of unfinished 787s newly built in North Charleston, S.C., has been piling up due to parts shortages.

The main holdups are new, still-uncertified business class seats and a part called a heat exchanger in the jet’s environmental-control system, supplies of which were interrupted by the war in Ukraine.

At an industrial conference this month, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg cited “good progress” on getting an alternative supply of heat exchangers but said “seats continue to be a problem.”

And the Everett mechanics freed up by the end of the 787 rework may soon have to help rework the inventory of about 30 previously built 777Xs that are lining unused runways at Paine Field, the first of them parked there for the past six years.

Those were built in advance of the 777X completing its flight tests, which extended much longer than expected and continue today.

Only when the giant new plane is certified can all those jets be taken out of mothballs, relubricated and updated with system changes.

A $6.3 billion hit

But at least the main 787 issue is behind Boeing now.

After initial discovery of the 787 fuselage-gap problem in summer 2020 — in the middle of the COVID-19 shutdown — deliveries of the 787 were halted starting that fall, resumed briefly the following spring and then halted again in May 2021 until August 2022.

Between November 2020 and August 2022, just 14 Dreamliners were delivered. Boeing in 2023 estimated that this 787 debacle racked up about $6.3 billion in “abnormal costs.”

By the end of last year, just 25 Dreamliners requiring the fuselage-gap rework remained.

Rolled out this week, the last one was a 787-10, the largest Dreamliner model, a jet built in South Carolina in December 2020.

Before the fuselage gaps on this jet were reworked, Boeing in 2023 used it for long-distance test flights from Seattle to Tokyo, Singapore and Bangkok. It was painted in the livery of Boeing’s ecoDemonstrator Explorer program, investigating how to reduce fuel usage and carbon emissions by optimizing flight paths.

It will now be repainted for delivery to an airline. According to aircraft data sites, it will go to TAAG Angola Airlines.

However, even with the fuselage gaps fixed, deliveries of these repaired aircraft will be slow.

In many cases, they will now be taken by a different airline than the originally intended customer and so need to be repainted or have new interiors installed — which could again come up against the parts shortages.

On Friday, Pope wrote on LinkedIn that Boeing will work with airlines to deliver the remaining reworked airplanes “over the course of this year and next.”

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com. Dominic Gates is a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist for The Seattle Times.

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Business Economy International Trade Boeing hugs its supplie...

Eric — 2/8/2025 6:51:06 AM

Boeing & Aerospace
Business
Economy
International Trade

Boeing hugs its suppliers instead of squeezing them for money

Feb. 7, 2025 at 11:44 am

Ihssane Mounir is the Boeing Commercial Airplanes senior vice president responsible for the global supply chain. At the Pacific Northwest Aerospace Alliance’s annual conference this week he promised to support... (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times, 2021)

By
Dominic Gates
Seattle Times aerospace reporter

LYNNWOOD — Bill Cusick, president of Ran-Tech Engineering, a manufacturer of metal aerospace parts employing 60 workers near Portland, credits a dramatic change in Boeing’s approach to suppliers with helping his company survive the Machinists strike last fall.

When the strike hit, 90% of Ran-Tech’s business was on hold as Boeing instructed suppliers to stop shipping parts.

But a few months before the strike, Cusick had been introduced to Ihssane Mounir, the Boeing Commercial Airplanes senior vice president responsible for the global supply chain.

In a series of meetings convened by Boeing through the Pacific Northwest Aerospace Alliance trade group, the leaders of about 20 small suppliers got face time with Mounir and his team, and a pledge that Boeing would be a partner to work through any problems that arose.

With the 53-day strike, “it was the rubber meets the road,” Cusick said in an interview. “What he said in that meeting prior to the strike, he lived up to during the strike.”

When Cusick reached out to Mounir and told him Ran-Tech couldn’t keep the lights on if it had to halt all parts shipments, Boeing worked with him to identify some parts that it would need soon, “the bare bones to get us both by, so that we could survive through the strike.”

With parts delivery pared way down but not completely stopped, Ran-Tech made it through.

“We’ve got a relationship going now,” Cusick said. “I’m able to continue to meet schedule, and 45 people out on the shop floor still have a job.”

This collaboration was in sharp contrast to a few years ago, when suppliers were bleeding money from a Boeing program called Partnering for Success. Contrary to the name, the program applied intense pressure on suppliers that transferred their profits to Boeing.

Justified by a promise of higher work volumes as production rates climbed, Boeing demanded that suppliers provide 15% price cuts on their parts every year. Boeing’s then-CEO Jim McNerney warned that any companies that didn’t step up would be dropped or, as he put it, added to a “no-fly list.”

That price squeeze, deeply resented, left many small suppliers on their knees and seriously weakened Boeing’s parts supply network. But brought to its own knees over the past six years, Boeing is a humbler company today.

“The Boeing mantra of ‘You do it my way or you’re done,’ I would say is almost gone,” Cusick said. “This past round has been great for collaboration.”

In a question-and-answer session after Mounir spoke Tuesday at the annual local suppliers conference in Lynnwood, Shawn Hosford, a business development representative for a series of small companies including Ran-Tech, thanked him for saving that business from collapse.

“He’s making a big difference,” Hosford said of Mounir, who switched from heading jet sales to overseeing Boeing’s troubled supplier network in December 2022. “His way of doing business is very partner-oriented. It’s relationship gold.”

A switch from “Shareholders First”In his presentation at the conference, Mounir described how during the strike, though a general halt to parts shipments was ordered, “as many of you in this room know, we broke that rule time and time again when you guys brought forward cases where you told us, ‘We cannot do that.’ “

Whether it was for reasons of financial distress or the likely permanent loss of workers if they were laid off, Boeing on a case-by-case basis offered support where it could.

“The conversations were difficult, but we got there,” Mounir said. He apologized that Boeing’s outreach might have missed some suppliers and urged: “If we missed you, please call, please reach out. You can call me direct and call my team direct.”

And if for some reason some new work has to be transferred to a supplier, always a potential risk point, he promised to send quality inspectors, manufacturing experts and engineers to offer support.

“I will be with you every step of the way,” Mounir said. “We’re your partners. And we’re only as good as you are.”

This was a startling contrast in tone from when Boeing executives addressed suppliers from the same stage over the past decade. Then it was: Give us lower prices and make sure you meet schedule, or we’ll find another supplier.

Kevin Michaels, founder of consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory and a supply chain expert, said in an interview on the sidelines of the PNAA conference that, with aerospace companies all damaged by the permanent loss of experienced workers who exited during the COVID pandemic, Boeing now “certainly has a more accommodating tone and recognizes that they need to help suppliers.”

He says this fresh attitude will have strong backing from Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg, whom Michaels worked under at Rockwell Collins in the 1990s.

“Kelly understands the importance of having healthy suppliers,” Michaels said. “He was a supplier himself. He was on the other side of Partnering for Success.”

That squeeze on suppliers was only one of Boeing’s strategies to improve the share price that ultimately proved damaging and that Ortberg must reverse.

Under McNerney and other CEOs, it also devalued its engineers as expendable, stomped on its unionized blue-collar employees, outsourced work central to the future and slashed costs everywhere.

Presenting at the conference, Michaels said the entire aerospace industry “has gone through kind of a dark period called Shareholders First.”

While this has been a mainstay strategy throughout corporate America since the days of former GE CEO Jack Welch, Michaels said the constant near-term focus on quarterly earnings figures has been especially damaging to aerospace.

“Shareholders First is not unique to this industry. It’s everywhere,” he said. “However, we’re in a long-cycle business that requires ongoing investment that may not pay off for 10 or 15 years.”

Referring to a column he recently wrote for trade magazine Aviation Week, he cited Honeywell as a prime example of a company ruined by this management approach.

Once “an absolute force to be reckoned with,” a prime avionics supplier on the 777 and 737NG and an inventor of critical aviation safety systems, Honeywell stopped investing in the future and slashed costs to boost profits and the share price.

A shadow of its former glory, having alienated both employees and customers, Honeywell announced Thursday it will break up into three separate companies.

Michaels said that though “Boeing went down this path,” he’s optimistic that it will recover.

“I’m very bullish on Boeing,” he said. “Boeing has a leader with the right values. I think Kelly’s going to turn this company around.”

How Boeing can prune back and focus

At the conference, Michaels warned that the aerospace supply network remains very weak at the level of smaller suppliers, where the prime manufacturers, Airbus and Boeing, have much less visibility.

Because many smaller suppliers in Europe are “in extreme financial distress,” he doesn’t believe Airbus will achieve its ambitious goal of producing 75 single-aisle A320neo family jets by 2027.

“It’ll be Whac-A-Mole for Airbus as it ramps up,” he said, anticipating multiple parts shortages, especially in cabin interiors and aerostructures.

Any recovery for Airbus or Boeing will require intense focus on supporting their suppliers.

To sharpen that focus, Ortberg plans to prune back parts of Boeing not core to its central military and commercial airplane businesses.

Offering advice on that, Michaels said Boeing should sell off large chunks of its Global Services division, formed in 2017 and headquartered in Plano, Texas.

To expand beyond supplying only Boeing spare parts, it acquired a giant distribution company supplying parts to airlines from many aerospace companies. And it bought another parts logistics business that delivers small parts to production lines of multiple manufacturers.

Boeing’s then-CEO Dennis Muilenburg announced the goal of growing this aftermarket unit into a $50 billion business — a goal long since abandoned.

Elements of this organization have proved unwieldy.

When an airline needs a part, it must contact Boeing Global Services. If it needs technical support to install the part, it must contact Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Michaels said. “You can get rid of all that overhead.”

He recommends retaining control of the Boeing proprietary parts, sending those back into the Commercial or Defense units as appropriate, but getting rid of the third-party distribution businesses.

Longtime aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia, a partner of Michaels at AeroDynamic Advisory and in recent years a severe critic of Boeing management, spoke optimistically at the conference of a turnaround in its fortunes.

“I like what I’m hearing out of Boeing and I’m kind of a believer in their recovery plan,” Aboulafia declared.

He did, however, reiterate his belief that Boeing needs to launch a new airplane soon to avoid further ceding the single-aisle jet market to rival Airbus.

He insisted Boeing mustn’t move so late that a new jet would enter service in the late 2030s. A successful airplane could be launched much sooner and prevent further loss of market share, he said.

In addition to the ongoing challenges of part shortages due to weakened suppliers, Aboulafia, Michaels and other analysts at the conference spoke of the challenge posed by the unpredictability of the Trump administration.

Michaels said tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico alone, if implemented without aerospace exceptions, would amount to “about a $4.5 billion tax on our industry.”

Aboulafia on a discussion panel explained more broadly why tariffs could prove damaging.

In the former Soviet Union, he said, a closed aerospace industry produced airplanes that were not commercially viable; and he noted that modern China also seeks to create a homegrown industry that can build everything itself.

He contrasted this with the open Western model.

“If you look at what makes this business great, it’s people, capital, technologies, industrial capacity and ideas crossing borders,” Aboulafia said. “This takes a world of people contributing their ideas, their innovation, their capital, their technologies.

“If you start screwing around with these tariffs, you’re sending a message that in fact that one-nation model is better.”

The world’s enormous demand for new jets, which neither Airbus nor Boeing can fill right now, provides a clearly profitable future for the industry if the near-term challenges can be overcome and jet production ramped up.

Boeing’s production rate is so low right now that parts shortages are not a critical problem.

But smaller aerospace companies, where pay is relatively low, continue to struggle to recruit and retain workers. The strength of Boeing’s supply chain and the support Mounir’s team provides will really be tested as 737 MAX production accelerates.

Mounir expressed guarded optimism.

“By and large, we’re seeing these supply chains starting to stabilize,” he said. “But there’s still work to be done.”

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com. Dominic Gates is a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist for The Seattle Times.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Business Boeing CEO Ortberg outlines 2025 priorities after h...

Eric — 1/28/2025 10:22:43 PM

Boeing & Aerospace
Business

Boeing CEO Ortberg outlines 2025 priorities after heavy losses

Jan. 28, 2025 at 6:30 am Updated Jan. 28, 2025 at 11:09 am

1 of 4 | Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg meets with employees at the Seattle Delivery Center last year. In a message to employees Tuesday, he spoke of progress after a challenging 2024. (Marian Lockhart / Boeing, 2024)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
and
Dominic Gates

In interviews after Boeing posted its detailed financial results Tuesday, new CEO Kelly Ortberg indicated the key priorities for 2025: getting airplane production back up safely, generating much-needed cash, integrating Spirit AeroSystems smoothly back into Boeing — and coping with the realities of the new Trump administration.

Having announced Boeing’s heavy 2024 losses and cash outflow last week, Ortberg was free to look forward.

In an interview with The Seattle Times on Tuesday, Ortberg said that six months into the job he thinks Boeing is “starting to turn the corner.”

“There’s a lot of issues, but there’s a lot to feel good about in terms of the direction that we’re taking,” he said.

Boeing expects 2025 to bring increased production in its slowed-down commercial division and improved contracts in its cash-burning defense and space division, leading to a positive cash flow in the second half of the year.

In its commercial division, Boeing will increase production of the 737 MAX, which has been hampered since an incident last January when a panel blew off a MAX plane midflight.

On a call with analysts, Ortberg said Boeing has agreed with the Federal Aviation Administration on a path to safely increase MAX production this year beyond the 38 jets per month cap put in place after the incident.

Separately, Boeing said it expects to clear out by midyear the remaining inventory of 55 MAXs that have been stored for years awaiting rework. And the rework on 25 stored 787s should be completed sometime early this year.

The rework on the MAXs is done mostly in Moses Lake in Central Washington. The rework on the 787s happens in Everett.

Shutting down what Boeing refers to as “shadow factories” will free up labor for Boeing’s other production lines, helping to drive more deliveries and reducing the massive $87.5 billion of inventory Boeing is sitting on, Chief Financial Officer Brian West told analysts.

A full return of Boeing’s competitiveness will be possible only when the company launches a new “clean-sheet” commercial jet, employees in this region and many in the industry believe.

“Boeing has already lost the 2020s to Airbus,” Melius Research analyst Scott Mikus wrote Tuesday in a note to investors. “If it wants a shot at winning the 2030s or 2040s, it will need a clean-sheet aircraft program.”

But Boeing first must get through the current financial crunch, Ortberg said.

“I got a lot of work to do to get the company in a healthy state,” Ortberg said. “We’ve got to be in a positive cash-generating position.”

Ortberg told The Seattle Times he’s “not too worried about a brain drain” of engineers as they wait to work on an ambitious new airplane project.

Boeing has plenty of challenging work ahead to solve technical issues in its current military and commercial development projects, he said, including certifying the 777X and 737 MAX 7 and MAX 10 variants.

One less predictable part of Boeing’s year ahead will be meeting the demands of the new Trump administration.

In an interview on CNBC, Ortberg expressed confidence that President Donald Trump will support Boeing.

“He’s keenly focused on American jobs, and he knows that the aviation industry is critically important to American jobs,” Ortberg said.

One path to Trump’s good side is already a major focus: working with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to accelerate the delayed Air Force One presidential jet program.

Musk has visited Boeing’s San Antonio, Texas, facility, where the jets are being built.

“The president wants the airplane sooner, and so we’re working with Elon and the team to figure out what can we do to pull up the schedule,” Ortberg said.

Boeing bled cash in 2024

The depth of the task to stabilize Boeing’s finances is apparent in the 2024 results.

Tuesday’s release reiterated that in the fourth quarter, Boeing lost $3.9 billion, or $5.46 per share, which means the total loss for all of 2024 was $11.82 billion, or $18.36 per share — only a tad better than the 2020 loss of $11.87 billion, the largest yearly loss ever.

And Boeing had a cash outflow in the fourth quarter of $4.1 billion. For the year, the aerospace giant burned through $14.3 billion.

Though Boeing started the fourth quarter with $10.5 billion in cash and then raised $24 billion through sales of shares and convertible debt, by the end of the year it was left with $26.3 billion.

That cash burn included repaying $3.5 billion in debt set to mature this year. Without the capital raise, it’s clear Boeing would have all but run out of cash.

Even though Boeing expects a positive cash flow in the second half of the year, West told analysts to expect a net cash outflow in 2025 of between $4 billion and $5 billion.

Nick Cunningham, an industry analyst with London-based Agency Partners, told investors that Tuesday’s public release was an opportunity for Ortberg “to start the process of laying out a route map to recovery and to tell the world what a recovered Boeing might look like.”

“But the depth of the problems revealed over recent quarters and scale of the challenge is such that it is probably too early to do that,” he added. “Management may need to remain in firefighting mode for some time yet.”

Boeing attributed last year’s losses to fixed charges from some troubled defense programs, costs associated with layoffs at the end of the year and the impacts of the Machinists strike that shuttered the company’s factories in the Puget Sound region.

The new Machinists contract will add some pressure on Boeing’s finances. But West pointed out that this labor cost remains less than 5% of the cost of building the airplanes and the long-term benefit will outweigh the costs as it enables Boeing to increase production rates.

Still, Ortberg said Boeing won’t ask the FAA to lift the cap on production until the company meets the safety and quality metrics in the safety plan agreed with the agency following the fuselage blowout.

He also promised to begin restoring “a culture of unity and accountability” at Boeing, in part by providing promotions and incentive bonuses based “not only in what we get done but how we get things done.”

“As I talk with employees, there’s a growing swell of excitement around restoring trust and getting their Boeing back,” Ortberg said.

Restarting production slowly but surely

Boeing restarted airplane production in the Pacific Northwest slowly following the strike to focus on quality management. But it’s now ticking upward.

West said the MAX production rate in January was between 20 to 25 jets per month, and Boeing expects to raise that to 42 per month by the end of the year.

All three MAX production lines in Renton are now running and a fourth line in Everett will be available as production rises.

“People are back to work and excited about the task ahead, and you can feel the energy when you’re back on the factory floor,” Ortberg said.

In South Carolina, 787 production at year-end was five jets per month, back up to the level of last February.

Slow certification of new premium passenger seats and shortages of a part called a heat exchanger in the jet’s environmental control system reduced the 787 production rate last year.

Ortberg said parts shortages across all the commercial jet programs are now “within their established control limit.” West told analysts he expects the 787 rate to get up to seven jets per month this year.

Ortberg also told employees that engineering fixes for the problems that have delayed certification of key commercial jets are in the works.

The 777X test fleet was grounded in August after a heavy metal component that transfers thrust from the engine to the airframe — called a “thrust link” — broke apart on one test plane and was found cracked in the other three.

Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration has demanded a fix for a flaw that could potentially disable the engine anti-ice system on the 737 MAX 7 and 10 models before those can be certified.

On the 777X problem, Ortberg said, “We have a good handle on fixing the thrust link issue.” Flights resumed this month to test the solution.

On the MAX 7 and 10, he said, Boeing is conducting tests “focusing on finalization of the anti-icing design solution.”

And though the financial results showed a total of $1.7 billion in write-offs on five key defense-side development projects — the KC-46 tanker and T-7 jet trainer for the Air Force; the commercial crew space vehicle; the MQ-25 aircraft carrier-based aerial refueling drone for the Navy; and the Air Force One presidential jets — Ortberg indicated he can see an end to the “quarterly drumbeat of cost growth” on these programs.

“We have completed deep dives on all of our challenging fixed-price development programs,” he told employees. “We are now more proactive and clear-eyed on the risks.”

Ortberg said Boeing is reviewing those contracts with the Pentagon to find places to reduce inefficiencies.

One of Ortberg’s most challenging tasks in the year ahead is the acquisition of Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita, Kan., the former Boeing unit that must now be reintegrated into the company two decades after it was sold off.

If not handled well, that has the potential to be a cash drain and source of production glitches. And Boeing cannot implement that integration until it completes the acquisition and takes control, expected around midyear.

“We are actively involved and working with Spirit on the manufacturing of the parts that come in to us,” Ortberg told The Seattle Times. “We know the business. We know the people.

“I think we’ve got a good plan.”

Workforce levels

In November and December last year, Boeing laid off nearly 4,000 people to align its workforce size with its financial reality, company executives told employees.

The layoffs hit 2,600 employees in Washington, the highest concentration of layoffs among states where Boeing cut employees, according to notices filed with unemployment agencies.

On Tuesday, Ortberg said the cuts had been beneficial.

“The reductions we’ve made — we streamlined the organization, we reduced layers of overhead — I think were all necessary to make us lean and nimble for the future,” he said.

But Ortberg said he’s “not anticipating any further major reductions.”

This year, “we’ll be adjusting head count levels depending on the (production) rates and the work scope,” he added. “But I think that will be on a more normal trajectory.”

However, Ortberg told analysts Boeing still plans to sell off some units that are considered not core to the business, including the Englewood, Colo.-based Jeppesen unit, which provides electronic air navigation services.

“We may be better off focusing our energy elsewhere,” he said.

Still, this won’t mean major changes to Boeing’s business overall. Think of it as “pruning the portfolio,” rather than “cutting down the tree,” Ortberg said.

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com: Dominic Gates is a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist for The Seattle Times.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Business Spokane facility gets $48M to boost thermoplastic r...

Eric — 1/25/2025 2:29:33 PM

Boeing & Aerospace
Business

Spokane facility gets $48M to boost thermoplastic research for planes

Jan. 25, 2025 at 6:00 am Updated Jan. 25, 2025 at 6:00 am

Marco Salviato, an aeronautics professor at the University of Washington who was involved in the funding proposal for the new Spokane facility, said the U.S. is a leader in thermoset composites but is falling behind in research.(Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times Amazon reporter

A new Spokane facility hopes to make lighter, more fuel-efficient airplane parts, marking the inland Northwest corridor as a hub for sustainable aviation manufacturing.

Using three giant machines — which all work like waffle irons, stamping and cooking airplane parts instead of breakfast treats — the facility will be a test bed for a new type of material meant to replace aluminum and steel.

That material, thermoplastic composite, is being hailed as the future of sustainable aviation and a crucial component to speeding up airplane production, advocates for the new facility said.

Compared with traditional metals and other alternatives now available, thermoplastic composites are more recyclable, durable and malleable. And the material is lighter, meaning the aircraft built with it will be more fuel-efficient and less costly to fly.

Steel, left, and thermoplastic are compared at University of Washington’s Advanced Composites Center. Manufacturers are already using thermoplastics to make airplane parts, but they’re generally used... (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)
“In aviation, saving weight is everything,” said Marco Salviato, an aeronautics professor at the University of Washington who was involved in the funding proposal for the new Spokane facility.

Manufacturers are already using thermoplastics to make airplane parts, but they’re generally used only for small pieces and are slow to build. The Spokane facility is meant to accelerate that work — in terms of the speed of production and the size of what it can create.

1 of 2 | Federal money from the CHIPS and Science Act might be the key to filling the mostly empty former Triumph Composite Systems offices and manufacturing plant in Airway Heights, Wash. (Jesse Tinsley / The Spokesman Review)

The 100,000-square-foot facility — the American Aerospace Materials Manufacturing Center — recently received a $48 million grant through the federal CHIPS and Science Act, passed in 2022 to spur U.S. development of semiconductors and other innovative projects.

The U.S. Department of Commerce chose Spokane as one of 31 federally designated “tech hubs” in 2023 but initially passed it over for CHIPS Act funding. Democratic Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray announced the funding this month.

Former Spokane-area U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican, also helped secure an additional $500 million for the designated “tech hubs” around the country through a year-end military spending bill.

Lawmakers worry the U.S. is at risk of falling behind other countries in developing thermoplastic composite materials. That means Spokane will now be at the center of America’s efforts to catch up.

“The country that figures out how to use advanced materials to increase manufacturing capacity and aircraft fuel efficiency is going to have a huge competitive advantage,” Cantwell said in a written statement announcing the funding. “America is handing the baton to Spokane.”

A mold, foreground, to make a Boeing 767 tail part out of composite material was donated by the company to UW’s Advanced Composites Center. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

“Marvel material”

Salviato, from the University of Washington, called thermoplastic composites a “marvel material.”

A window frame made from thermoplastic composites could be up to 40% lighter than the same part made from aluminum.

There are two buckets of composite materials meant to replace traditional metals like aluminum and steel: thermosets, which are more common in aviation today, and thermoplastics, which are still being researched.

Thermoset composites have many of the same benefits as thermoplastics but can’t be recycled or welded. Thermoplastics, on the other hand, use a different kind of polymer and can be more easily broken down, which allows them to be recycled, molded during production and reshaped for maintenance and repairs.

1 of 2 | A composite material sample made by a robot is seen at the University of Washington’s Advanced Composites Center. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

Salviato compared the two types of materials to more breakfast foods. Thermosets are like making scrambled eggs; once they’re cooked, there’s no going back. Thermoplastics are like butter; they can continuously be changed, broken down and reformed.

Thermoplastics are also faster to make, cutting production time from hours to minutes. And the material doesn’t have an expiration date. Thermosets have to be stored in a freezer, or they’ll break down at room temperature after about 28 days, Salviato said. Even cooled, the material only lasts six months.

Right now, thermosets make up about 80% of the composite material in use in the aerospace industry, while thermoplastics make up about 20%. But, because thermoplastics are faster to make, the material will be crucial to the future of aviation, Salviato said.

Aerospace manufacturers have been researching thermoplastic composites for at least 40 years, said John Busel, who leads the Composites Growth Initiative at the American Composites Manufacturers Association. Busel was working on thermoplastic composites at Boeing in the 1980s.

1 of 3 | A close-up of an aircraft window frame made of thermoplastic composite is seen at a facility in Kent. (Karen Ducey / The Seattle Times)

The material first appeared on planes in service in the 1990s and investment ramped up in the 2000s, Busel continued. Boeing’s 787 and its rival Airbus’ A350, both released in the early 2010s,were “major steps” forward in applying new composite material, thermosets and thermoplastics, Busel said. Roughly half of the 787 is made of composites, he said.

But the progression won’t be linear. Not every new plane model will include more composites, Busel said. Thermoplastic composites, particularly, are still costly and difficult to produce at scale.

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Inside the test bed

The new facility in Spokane hopes to be the premier U.S. site for experimenting and validating airplane parts built with thermoplastic composites. Manufacturers will then be able to bring what they learn back to their own production line.

The goal is to “take it from a pilot to scale up to production,” said Busel, who works with some of the more than 50 stakeholders who helped make the new facility possible.

These machines “are very sophisticated and do a lot of things that manual labor could not do repeatedly,” Busel said. “That is the key. How can we make this structure and repeat it, and know exactly what it’s going to be for the first unit to unit 5,000?”

The three presses to be built at the facility, which was built to make airplane parts for Boeing and later sold to a Boeing supplier, use a combination of heat and pressure to fuse the thermoplastic composite material into new parts. Just like pouring batter into a waffle maker, Salviato said, the unconsolidated material will fill every crevice in the mold.

“What you end up getting is a product that is very close to its final shape,” he said. “So you minimize the extra machining that you would normally do.”

The Wing Maker will be an 800-ton press specialized for creating wing support beams. The Development Press will be a 1,000-ton shuttle press used for rapid testing. And the Giant Press will be a 5,000-ton machine that shapes massive aircraft parts.

The Giant Press will be the equivalent of applying the weight of 1,600 pickup trucks, Salviato said.

The center, which will open in 2026 and be fully operational by 2027, will also train the aerospace workforce on how to use these types of machines.

Cantwell hopes the new center will make Spokane a “cluster of that kind of expertise,” attracting more companies to invest in the region.

“Once you show the technology proof of concept then it will be working with different manufacturers on how they want to adopt that,” Cantwell said in an interview.

Then, Spokane can turn to the next innovation, she said. The goal is to focus on “those areas of expertise that manufacturers can’t figure out on their own.”

The University of Washington’s Advanced Composites Center is located in a Sand Point building that dates back to the early decades of the last century. Sen. Maria Cantwell recently secured funding for a new... (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

Complementary research

In Seattle, Salviato and other UW researchers have already been testing how to create and use thermoplastic composite material in aviation.

In a 16,000-square-foot warehouse in Magnuson Park, UW’s Advanced Center for Composites sits on the same ground that was once the launchpad for the first flight around the world in 1924. The center, focused on composites research, opened in 2022.

Inside, Salviato and his team are working on how to use both thermoset and thermoplastic composites to build intricate airplane parts.

One robot lays carbon fiber composite material eight spools at a time and then points a laser to fuse it together. Another machine runs an ultrasound over newly created composite material to detect flaws. Down the line, UW hopes to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the analysis of that data, making it easier to spot defects.

Another robot is speeding up the process for testing new material for certification by the Federal Aviation Administration. Rather than manually running hundreds of tests, the robot can keep moving materials through the series of evaluations 24/7.

A device uses an ultrasound to scan for defects in composite materials being tested at the University of Washington’s Advanced Composites Center. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

Salviato sees the work as a complement to the Spokane tech hub. While the new facility will build massive parts at a quick pace and large scale, the UW research center builds more complex structures and is fine-tuning the intricate parts of the process.

The thermoplastic composites that come out of the new facility, for example, will need to be tested for FAA certification and could benefit from the robotic testing happening at UW. A new machine scheduled to come to UW’s center by the end of the year would allow manufacturers to 3D print airplane parts like stiffeners or air ducts directly on top of the large pieces that are produced in Spokane.

Salviato moved from Italy to the U.S. because in the early 2000s this was the best place to study composite materials. The U.S. still is a leader in thermoset composites, he said, but it is falling behind other countries in thermoplastic research.

He hopes the combination of UW’s research, Spokane’s new testing facility and government investment in the region will put the U.S. and Washington back on top.

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Business Losses piled up for Boeing in 2024 Jan. 23, ...

Eric — 1/23/2025 9:59:19 PM

Boeing & Aerospace
Business

Losses piled up for Boeing in 2024

Jan. 23, 2025 at 6:04 pm

Boeing lost billions of dollars in 2024, with most divisions losing money. (Jennifer Buchanan / The Seattle Times)

By
Dominic Gates
Seattle Times aerospace reporter

How bad was 2024 for Boeing financially?

On Thursday the company announced fourth quarter details showing it lost last year about $11.8 billion, the second heaviest loss in Boeing history.

The data released after the stock market closed Thursday also shows a fourth quarter cash outflow of $3.5 billion, which means Boeing burned through $13.7 billion in cash in 2024.

Boeing attributed the financial meltdown, which included $2.8 billion in fourth quarter write-offs, to the lost revenue during the strike by Machinists in the fall and the higher labor costs in the new contract Machinists won, as well as further delays on major defense programs.

Still, in a statement released with the worrying financial details, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who took charge in August, spoke of the new Machinists contract as a positive for the future.

“Although we face near-term challenges, we took important steps to stabilize our business during the quarter including reaching an agreement with our IAM-represented teammates,” he said “Our team remains focused on the hard work ahead to build a new future for Boeing.”

Big charges on 777X, 767 and military programsBoeing said it will report a loss in the fourth quarter of $5.46 per share, which analyst Scott Mikus of Melius Research calculated as equating to an overall quarterly loss of about $3.8 billion. That’s significantly worse than the consensus projections among Wall Street analysts of just less than $1 billion.

The overall 2024 loss is just less than the largest ever in 2020, when a combination of the 737 MAX grounding and the global pandemic paralyzing aviation caused an $11.9 billion loss.

Boeing’s chaotic year began with 737 MAX deliveries halted after a large fuselage panel on an Alaska Airlines flight blew out in midair. That drew sharp attention from the Federal Aviation Administration, which capped MAX production until Boeing gets control of its safety and quality management.

Production was only beginning to ramp up again when the Machinists struck in September. For the 53 days of the strike, extending well into the fourth quarter, Boeing delivered only a few commercial airplanes.

In October, Boeing delivered just commercial 14 jets. Even in Boeing’s North Charleston, S.C, plant, where the workforce was not on strike, production of the 787 Dreamliner was slowed by shortages of parts from a supply chain weakened since the pandemic.

Boeing said its Commercial Airplanes unit lost $2.1 billion in the fourth quarter. That outcome reflects the reduced revenue due to lower jet deliveries during the Machinists strike and higher labor costs in the final agreement, Boeing said.

It took a $900 million write-off on the 777X program for the higher labor costs that “will be incurred over the next several years,” and another $200 million write-off on the 767.

Boeing’s Defense and Space unit lost $2.3 billion in the fourth quarter. That reflected a total of $1.7 billion in write-offs on a series of troubled fixed-cost programs for the Pentagon.

The largest defense write-off was $800 million on the KC-46 air-to-air refueling tanker for the Air Force. That aircraft is a military derivative of the 767 built in Everett. Boeing again attributed the charge to the Machinists strike and final contract creating “higher estimated manufacturing costs.”

This brings total Boeing KC-46 tanker write-offs over the past decade to $9 billion.

Boeing also took a $500 million charge on its T-7 jet trainer and a further $400 million on three more troubled programs: the commercial crew space vehicle; the MQ-25 aircraft carrier-based aerial refueling drone for the Navy; and the Air Force One program, now likely delayed until after President Donald Trump’s term is over.

All of those defense-side programs are far behind schedule and all are money-losing. During 2024, Boeing’s defense and space unit wrote off a total of $5 billion.

In an interview, Ron Epstein, an analyst with Bank of America, said he’s surprised at the constant stream of defense-side cost overruns.

“When does this defense stuff end?” Epstein asked. “How many times do you have to hear, we’ve accounted for it all?”

Only Boeing’s aftermarket services division made money in the fourth quarter.

This latest financial plunge comes after Boeing wrote off $5 billion just three months ago as it reported a $6.2 billion loss for the third quarter, very little of which was due to the Machinists’ strike.

Thanks to $21 billion raised through a share sale in October, at least Boeing has lots of capital to help get through the current crisis.

Its cash on hand, which was just $10.5 billion at the end of September, at the end of 2024 stood at $26.3 billion, Boeing said.

Though Boeing shares had gained $3.70 during trading Thursday, after the news of the quarterly financial damage broke, shares lost most of that gain in after-hours trading.

Boeing’s release Thursday was a preannouncement of the bad news. The company will provide more details in its quarterly report Tuesday.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com. Dominic Gates is a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist for The Seattle Times.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Business Crisis-hit Boeing delivered less than half as many ...

Eric — 1/15/2025 3:41:15 PM

Boeing & Aerospace
Business

Crisis-hit Boeing delivered less than half as many jets as Airbus in 2024

Jan. 14, 2025 at 6:28 pm

Boeing was forced to reassess its safety and quality management after a 737 MAX fuselage blew a hole on an Alaska Airlines flight a year ago. MAX production in Renton, seen here in June, slowed dramatically for all of... (Jennifer Buchanan / The Seattle Times)

By
Dominic Gates
Seattle Times aerospace reporter

Year-end jet orders and deliveries figures released Tuesday by Boeing reveal how much Airbus dominated its crisis-ridden U.S. rival in 2024.

In the smaller narrowbody jet sector that services domestic and intermediate-range flights, Airbus delivered 602 of its A320neo jet family aircraft while Boeing delivered just 260 of the 737 MAXs that compete head-to-head.

Well over half of those Airbus deliveries were of the larger A321neo, against which Boeing has no airplane that can match it in size and range.

Airbus dominance in that market segment skewed the overall figures dramatically. Boeing delivered a total of 348 commercial jets in 2024, while Airbus delivered 766.

Airbus is the world’s No. 1 jet maker for the sixth consecutive year

Airbus has outproduced Boeing since the second 737 MAX crash in 2019. Last year, the fallout from the Alaska Airlines midair fuselage blowout and then the Machinist strike in the fall cut Boeing production to its lowest level since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sources: Boeing, Airbus (Reporting by Dominic Gates, graphic by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)

Market pricing data from aircraft valuation firm Avitas peg the Airbus deliveries as worth $52 billion, exactly twice the value of Boeing’s deliveries.

Boeing’s troubles last year are well documented. It had to cut production of the 737 MAX drastically after the midair fuselage blowout on an Alaska Airlines flight a year ago.

And a nascent recovery from that stalled in the fall when a 52-day Machinists union strike stopped almost all Boeing jet production in its Puget Sound assembly plants.

Focused on restoring quality and safety, Boeing chose to restart production very slowly and carefully after the strike.

The entire aerospace industry’s supply chain remains severely weakened by the loss of experienced workers during the COVID pandemic. So Airbus couldn’t ramp up production as fast as planned due to parts shortages, limiting its ability to take further advantage of Boeing’s weakness.

Airbus Commercial CEO Christian Scherer, in a media teleconference last week, listed the “weak links in the chain” including supply of engines, seats, galleys, and some aero structures, particularly those made by troubled partsmaker Spirit AeroSystems, the supplier Boeing will acquire later this year.

“The challenges that this industry is throwing at us, the world is throwing at us, are not going away,” Scherer said, adding that Airbus is therefore putting intense effort into helping out suppliers and to recruit and train new employees.

“Airbus has shown leadership and pulled the industry up,” said Scherer.

Airbus and Boeing suffered similar supply chain problems. That Airbus came out so far ahead is down to Boeing’s self-inflicted wounds.

Boeing must begin to turn its fortunes around this year to avoid falling further behind because Airbus plans a relentless production increase as it fixes its supply chain.

Airbus now operates eight A320 jet family assembly lines — two in Toulouse, France; four in Hamburg, Germany; one in Tianjin, China; and one in Mobile, Ala. — all now equipped to build the larger A321 model.

Scherer reiterated that Airbus plans to increase production of the A320 family from 50 per month in 2024 to 75 per month in 2027.

To implement that ramp-up, Airbus plans to add another A320 assembly line in Mobile and another in Asia by 2026.

Airlines rush to order Airbus as demand for jets soars

On the sales front, Boeing also lagged Airbus badly. Airbus won 826 net orders in 2024, while Boeing won 377.

Separately, Boeing removed a net 60 orders from its official backlog in 2024. Those are not canceled, but according to accounting principles can no longer be counted as firm orders due to uncertainty as to whether the customers can take delivery.

If those were cut from the tally, Boeing’s net orders for last year would fall to 317.

Because of lack of clarity about which Boeing sub-models of the MAX were among the canceled orders, assessing the value of the orders is less precise than the calculated value of deliveries. That said, the data indicates Boeing’s 377 net orders were valued at about half that of the Airbus orders.

In 2024, with Boeing in crisis, Airbus dominated in both jet production and sales
Airbus vastly outproduced Boeing in narrowbody jets and also delivered one more widebody aircraft than Boeing. In sales, Airbus won orders last year worth double the dollar value of Boeing’s orders.

Sources: Boeing, Airbus (Reporting by Dominic Gates, graphic by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)

Despite tremendous demand for new airplanes, airlines hesitated to place new orders for Boeing jets and cancelled some prior orders due in part to the well-publicized troubles and in part to the delay in getting three new airplane models — the MAX 7, MAX 10 and 777X jets — certified for service by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Airbus had 52 orders cancelled in 2024, while Boeing had 192 cancellations.

Fully 135 of the Boeing cancellations were from one airline, Jet Airways of India, which was liquidated last year. Boeing had earlier taken those orders out of its official backlog when Jet ceased operations back in 2019.

Airbus and Boeing each made big bets in the Indian market, with very different outcomes.

Boeing sold heavily to both Jet and low-cost carrier SpiceJet, while Airbus won big orders from SpiceJet rival IndiGo.

Jet is out of business; SpiceJet went through a sharp downturn and shrank dramatically. IndiGo is now India’s largest airline.

Boeing losing its edge in widebody jets

Boeing has historically had an edge over Airbus in the market for larger, more expensive widebody jets.

But even there, Airbus in 2024 delivered 89 widebodies, one more than Boeing. And Airbus won 220 net orders for widebody jets last year, while Boeing won 133.

Airbus sales chief Benoit de Saint-Exupéry savored that outcome, saying the European plane-maker overtook Boeing in both widebody deliveries and orders mostly due to the growing success of the large A350 jet.

Midsize to large widebody

Sources: Boeing, Airbus (Reporting by Dominic Gates, graphic by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)

Airbus delivered 57 of those jets and won orders for 138 more.

Underlining the threat especially from the very large A350-1000 model, Boeing has no new widebody jet ready to compete with it.

Boeing delivered its final old-model 777 passenger plane in December, a plane that had been in storage since the COVID pandemic hit in 2020.

Very large widebody

Sources: Boeing, Airbus (Reporting by Dominic Gates, graphic by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)

With the 777’s replacement, the 777X, long delayed and not scheduled to enter service until late 2026 at the earliest, demand for the A350 has taken off.

“The A350 has clearly emerged as the long-haul leader,” Saint-Exupéry said, adding that he projects it will be “the reference for replacing the big 777 fleet around the world.”

Airbus plans to ramp up A350 deliveries to 12 jets per month and the smaller widebody A330neo to four jets per month by 2028.

And in the one commercial aircraft market where Boeing has until recently faced virtually no competition from Airbus — cargo planes — that niche now is also showing a shift.

Boeing will stop making the 767 freighter in 2027 and the new 777X freighter won’t enter the market until 2028 at the earliest. That offers an opening for the A350F cargo plane.

Large widebody cargo jets

Sources: Boeing, Airbus (Reporting by Dominic Gates, graphic by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)

This month, too late for the 2024 tally, Starlux Airlines of Taiwan ordered five more A350Fs to double its initial order and bring the jet’s order book to 60.

“One of our objective for 2025 is to penetrate the big freight carriers in the U.S.” said Saint-Exupéry, targeting the one cargo market still largely closed to Airbus.

As Boeing begins 2025 with an ambition to correct its course and raise production safely, the pressure from Airbus appears set to grow more intense.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com. Dominic Gates is a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist for The Seattle Times.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Business Obituaries Superstar engineer John Hart-Smith skewe...

Eric — 1/11/2025 1:02:19 PM

Boeing & Aerospace
Business
Obituaries

Superstar engineer John Hart-Smith skewered Boeing’s strategy | Obituary

Jan. 11, 2025 at 6:00 am Updated Jan. 11, 2025 at 6:00 am

In this undated photo, John Hart-Smith, second from left, is admitted as a fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in Kew, Melbourne. (Courtesy of family)

787 aircraft lined up at Boeing’s Everett production plant in June undergo rework to fix defects at the fuselage and other joins. The 787 has proved to be a boondoggle for Boeing, as predicted by star engineer John Hart-Smith, who died last month. (Jennifer Buchanan / The Seattle Times)

By
Dominic Gates
Seattle Times aerospace reporter

More than two decades ago, aerospace engineer John Hart-Smith, then already a world-renowned expert on designing aircraft structures, gained fame beyond his field when he warned Boeing management that its shortsighted financial focus would be ruinous.

In an internal Boeing presentation in 2001, and in essays written with hilariously dry wit and sharp insight, he lampooned America’s corporate business culture of outsourcing, cost-cutting and downsizing.

“I had lived through the destruction of Douglas Aircraft and I saw the same thing about to happen at Boeing,” Hart-Smith explained in a 2019 interview.

Boeing’s senior nontechnical leaders, champions of the management strategies he mocked, dismissed as naive the views of a top engineer about business matters. They sidelined him within the company.

Hart-Smith, revered for his technical know-how, admired for his force of intellect and loved by colleagues for his humble, endearingly eccentric personality, died in December, aged 84, at his home in Melbourne, Australia, long after Boeing’s trajectory had clearly proven his prescience.

His daughter Kate Hart-Smith said by phone he died of kidney failure on Dec. 13 after a couple of weeks in hospital. He was surrounded by family.

A top Boeing engineer, John Hart-Smith was a renowned worldwide... (John Hart-Smith / )

That day, he insisted on working from his hospital bed on a final engineering paper that he’s been developing for several years.

“He had his sons-in-law there helping him with the computer, just getting the last caption on the last graph. It was quite extraordinary. He was very determined to get that finished,” said Kate.

His family has submitted the paper to an engineering journal for publication.

Former Boeing Chief Technical Officer John Tracy announced Hart-Smith’s death on LinkedIn, a post that drew many comments from engineers, academics and aerospace figures all over the world praising his life and legacy.

In an interview, Tracy recalled first meeting the already-famed engineer in person in the early 1980s, seeking him out after reading his definitive early work on joining carbon composite aircraft parts.

“He was a superstar in the field. I was like a Little League guy, and I wanted to talk to Babe Ruth,” said Tracy, who would later be Hart-Smith’s boss at Boeing. “He was willing to talk to somebody that knew next to nothing, and help him. He was just the sweetest guy in the world.”

Yet Hart-Smith also quixotically and unflinchingly stood up against conventional wisdom if he considered it manifestly stupid.

Jim Ogonowski, former senior chief engineer for structures at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said Hart-Smith “had absolutely no regard to hierarchy. It wouldn’t make any difference to him who he was speaking to, he would speak his mind.”

That 2001 internal paper “caused a lot of internal consternation among Boeing senior leadership,” Ogonowski said in an interview. “It took time, a lot of time, before eventually I would say he was proved correct.”

A passion took him far away

John Hart-Smith, with a model plan in Kew, Australia, circa 1950. (Courtesy of family)

John Hart-Smith during his time as a student at Melbourne University in 1961. (Courtesy of family)

Leonard John Hart-Smith was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1940.

His father, Leonard, grew up in a poor family during the Depression, won scholarships to university, earned a doctorate at Oxford, and later became director of National Parks in the Australian state of Victoria and an authority on lyrebirds.

Hart-Smith said he got his refined, almost British accent from his father.

Though his dad wanted him to be a doctor, the World War II boom in aviation ignited a different passion in a very young Hart-Smith.

“From 1942, planes were flying all over when I was growing up,” he said. “From the age of 2, I wanted to be an aircraft engineer.”

He earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Monash University and then landed a job in 1968 at Douglas Aircraft by writing to the chief engineer in Long Beach, Calif.

Married with two daughters, he began a four-decade career that meant spending much of the year in America.

He and his wife separated, but despite the time far away he maintained a close relationship with the children. Each Australian summer, he’d return and take his daughters along with his parents and siblings for a monthlong vacation at a national park.

His daughter Kate described her father as “very loving, very generous and really thoughtful.”

John Hart-Smith, back, is pictured with his daughters Sylvia, left, and Kate, at Kate’s wedding in March 2003 at Port Melbourne, Australia. (Courtesy of family)

John Hart-Smith, right foreground, with daughters, grandchildren and great grandchildren in August 2023 at Brighton, Australia.

“He couldn’t have done his work the way he did if he’d stayed in Australia,” she continued. “We understand why he had to go.

“We loved him very dearly, and we knew that he loved us. The distance and the lack of direct contact really didn’t matter.”

An engineering iconHart-Smith’s work at Douglas, often under contract to NASA or the U.S. Air Force, won numerous accolades as he developed new methods to fasten or adhesively bond together both carbon composite and metallic structures, to analyze such designs and to test the results.

In one major Air Force research project, he developed a widebody fuselage that was adhesively bonded, without fasteners.

Ogonowski said Hart-Smith produced designs with an eye to making them easily manufactured so that his work “became almost gospel in the industry.”

A C-17 Globemaster lll airlifter undergoes testing over the skies above Paine Field in Everett. (Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times, 2020)

He redesigned the composite tail cone of the giant C-17 military cargo plane, previously a single complex piece made from carbon composite prone to defects, breaking it into six easy-to-manufacture pieces bonded together that could be produced with zero defects.

“He was able to radically simplify the design and manufacturing,” said Tracy. “He had just a sixth sense understanding of what the load paths were.”

With that project alone, Hart-Smith saved the company many tens of millions of dollars, Tracy added.

In the late 1980s, Hart-Smith even helped fix a major structural problem for a Douglas competitor: Boeing.

Studying the contours around the cockpit on the 747 jumbo jet, he analyzed the loads and predicted cracks would develop in the fuselage frames. With the blessing of his bosses at Douglas, he shared this analysis with his peers at Boeing and when cracks were indeed discovered, his explanation of why it was happening allowed Boeing engineers to develop a fix.

“That gave me a lot of credibility within Boeing’s technical management,” Hart-Smith said.

Then, after Boeing’s 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, while Ogonowski and Tracy joined Boeing management as top technical executives, Hart-Smith was elevated to the top echelon of nonmanagerial engineers, becoming a senior technical fellow.

Standing up to Boeing’s leadership

Hart-Smith’s promotion brought with it a requirement to present a paper before the top engineering leadership at the next annual Boeing Technical Excellence Conference at the company’s Leadership Institute in St. Louis.

That’s where Hart-Smith had the chutzpah to present his detailed 2001 paper not on the technicalities of airplane structural joins but about Boeing’s business strategy.

He wasn’t as naive on this topic as top executives believed. He had a certificate in business management from UCLA, completing the course work for an MBA, though not bothering to do the internship required for the master’s degree.

Filtered through Hart-Smith’s independent intellect, those classes provided the fuel to fire his subsequent fierce mockery of business schools and of newly minted MBAs.

When the day of his technical fellowship presentation arrived, Hart-Smith was unable to travel from California as he’d just had surgery to insert a stent below his heart. So he delivered his talk by phone, with a colleague flipping the slides in St. Louis.

He presented essentially an economics paper, delivered with a trademark deadpan humor.

It scathingly critiqued the McDonnell Douglas strategy, now foisted on Boeing, of outsourcing work and divesting core design and manufacturing assets.

He explained in clear, commonsense terms how this would ultimately increase costs, lower profits and jeopardize Boeing’s ability to develop future airplanes.

Hart-Smith learned afterward from colleagues in the room that after he’d finished and hung up, Boeing’s then Chief Technical Officer Dave Swain stood up and spoke for a half-hour attempting to rebut Hart-Smith’s arguments.

“By the time he was through, there was no one in the room who didn’t agree with me,” Hart-Smith said dryly in 2019.

His paper buzzed from inbox to inbox within Boeing and was cited ever after by employees.

Winnie the Pooh takes on corporate AmericaWith his fearlessly impish independence, Hart-Smith stood his ground in arguments and took no prisoners in technical debates.

Tracy recalls with laughter how Hart-Smith launched crusades to refute analyses of how composite structures fail published by other eminent engineers.

“He would write these technical papers where he would call these other scientists charlatans and snake oil salesmen,” Tracy said. “I had to keep everybody calm and nice. I said, ‘John, you can’t use the word charlatan in a technical journal article.’

“It’s not that he thought he was smarter or better than anybody. He was one of the most humble people that you could ever imagine,” Tracy added. “He was just so dedicated to his work and what he believed to be true.”

Ogonowski compared Hart-Smith to “almost like an Einstein type,” whose appearance and demeanor masked a fierce and brilliant intellect.

Indeed he had the personality quirks of a man whose brain focused intensely on his work and paid little attention to the mundane details of daily life.

His office was “an absolute disaster,” piled so high with stacks of papers and reference materials that the company fire department would urge Tracy “to get this guy to clean up his office; it’s a fire hazard.”

Hart-Smith procrastinated every year about filing his U.S. tax returns. He could barely handle the basic upkeep of his house in Long Beach. He worried over utility bills going unpaid while he was away in Australia.

His tastes were simple and frugal. His favored restaurant was Denny’s.

Endlessly pursuing his critique of management, in the 1990s Hart-Smith wrote a series of stories, circulated privately to friends and colleagues, that humorously depicted Winnie the Pooh besting teams of business consultants with common sense.

The “bear with very little brain” was a satirical stand-in for Hart-Smith, who in later years indeed shared Winnie the Pooh’s somewhat short, roly-poly stature.

Asked why he didn’t publish these well-written, funny pieces, he replied helplessly that Disney owned the copyright to Winnie the Pooh and “I don’t have contacts there.”

Given Hart-Smith’s antipathy to management, Tracy recognizes that when he rose to become the top manager of Boeing’s engineers, “I codified everything that he disliked.”

Nevertheless, Hart-Smith “still treated me like his friend.”

“It was hard not to love him, even when you were mad at him,” Tracy said, laughing again. “I loved that guy.”

Warning on the cost of the 787

The wing and center fuselage sections are joined inside the Boeing 787 final assembly factory in Everett. (Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times, 2014)

In the mid-2000s, Hart-Smith fought another battle within Boeing, when he tried to warn that the plan to build the 787 Dreamliner was seriously flawed and would prove very costly.

He first joined other engineers in recommending that it be made from metal, not carbon composites.

In that period, Hart-Smith led a small research team that developed a new metal fuselage design that was cheaper to build and would last longer than previous metal fuselages. It was tested to five lifetimes without any fatigue cracks.

When Boeing insisted on building the 787 from composites, Hart-Smith advised against the concept of fabricating the jet from single-piece composite barrels, each made by a different major subcontractor.

He told them that perfectly joining these large fuselage sections would prove extremely costly. He wrote a report advocating a better approach: making the sections from curved, fuselage-length panels fastened together.

Management again refused to listen. And once again, time proved Hart-Smith right.

A LATAM Airlines Boeing 787 approaches for landing in Lisbon at sunrise on July 5, 2023. (Armando Franca / The Associated Press)

While the 787 is a hugely successful plane, in service at airlines around the world, it has been a financial disaster for Boeing with no hope of recouping the billions of dollars spent on its development.

Most recently, gaps at those fuselage joins stopped 787 deliveries for many months and have cost Boeing $6.3 billion to repair.

After Hart-Smith retired from Boeing in 2008, Ogonowski brought him back as a consultant until 2015.

“I respected his insight. It caused me to think, to make sure that I wasn’t drinking my own bath water,” Ogonowski said. “He would be the one to give a different perspective.”

Then, in full retirement, Hart-Smith focused for at least the past five years on that one final paper he wanted to write.

He believed he’d found an error in the standard academic theories about how thin shell structures like aircraft fuselages buckle under pressure, one that accounted for a significant discrepancy between theoretical projections and the actual test results airplane manufacturers work from.

The paper he finished in hospital on his dying day was his last shot at convincing academics to accept his position.

Ogonowski said it’s possible Hart-Smith may yet be proven right. “I hope so,” he said.

Hart-Smith is survived by two daughters, Kate and Sylvia Winfield, his brother Neil Hart-Smith and sister Helen Kosky, as well as four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, all of Melbourne, Australia.

He has requested that his ashes be spread at Wilsons Promontory, the national park at the southern tip of mainland Australia where he spent those many summers with his family.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com. Dominic Gates is a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist for The Seattle Times.

seattletimes.com

[Selectric II] Elon Musk says Boeing is on a 'much better track' with its new CEO because its...

Selectric II — 12/26/2024 11:31:00 AM

Elon Musk says Boeing is on a 'much better track' with its new CEO because its previous leader 'had no idea how airplanes or rockets worked'

Kwan Wei Kevin Tan
Dec 26, 2024, 9:09 AM EST

"The prior guy had no idea how airplanes or rockets worked. Just zero," Elon Musk said of former Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun on Wednesday. Apu Gomes via Getty Images; Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images

Elon Musk had some criticism for former Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun on Christmas Day.
"Boeing is on a much better track with the new CEO," Musk wrote on X.
Musk said Calhoun, an accounting graduate, "had no idea how airplanes or rockets worked."

Boeing is "on a much better track" after changing CEOs, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday.

Musk was talking about America's shortage of engineering talent on X when he was asked about the embattled aerospace manufacturer.

"That said, talking in terms of specific companies, Boeing is on a much better track with the new CEO. The prior guy had no idea how airplanes or rockets worked. Just zero," Musk wrote in his post.

Boeing was previously led by Dave Calhoun, who served as the company's CEO from January 2020 to July 2024.

The Virginia Tech accounting graduate was succeeded by former Rockwell Collins CEO Kelly Ortberg in August. Ortberg holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Iowa.

When Boeing announced Calhoun's resignation in March, Calhoun said the decision was 100% his own.

"I've entered my fifth year. At the end of this year, I'll be close to 68 years old," Calhoun said in an interview with CNBC.

This isn't the first time Musk has criticized Calhoun's academic background. Back in June, Musk said that Boeing had lost touch with its engineering roots.

"The CEO of an aircraft company should know how to design aircraft, not spreadsheets," Musk wrote in an X post on June 25.

Representatives for Calhoun and Ortberg at Boeing did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment. Musk also did not respond to a request for comment.

Calhoun's departure came amid a deepening quality-control crisis at Boeing.

The aerospace company faced intense scrutiny in January after a door plug flew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 during an Alaskan Airlines flight from Oregon to California.

The incident resulted in a series of investigations from the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Justice, and the National Transportation Safety Board.

According to a Senate subcommittee report on Boeing's safety and quality practices that was published in June, several whistleblowers came forward to express concerns about how Boeing handles faulty plane parts.

Calhoun's predecessor, Dennis Muilenburg, was fired after two crashes involving a different Max variant, the Max 8, killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019.

Calhoun publicly apologized to the families of the crash victims during a Senate hearing in June, but defended Boeing's safety record when he was grilled by lawmakers.

"You're proud of the safety record?" Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri asked Calhoun.

"I am proud of every action we've taken," Calhoun said.

In October, Ortberg shared his four-part turnaround plan for Boeing in a memo to employees.

Ortberg's plan called for a fundamental change in the company's culture, a stabilization of its business, an improvement in execution discipline, and the building of a new future for the planemaker.

"We need to be on the factory floors, in the back shops and in our engineering labs. We need to know what's going on, not only with our products, but with our people," Ortberg wrote.

"And most importantly, we need to prevent the festering of issues and work better together to identify, fix, and understand root cause," he added.

Boeing reported a net loss of $6.1 billion in the third quarter of 2024 in the same month. The company recorded a loss of more than $1.4 billion in the previous quarter.

Boeing's shares are down by over 31% this year.

"It will take time to return Boeing to its former legacy, but with the right focus and culture, we can be an iconic company and aerospace leader once again," Ortberg said in his October memo.

businessinsider.com

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Business International Trade Nation & World Boeing wins $36 ...

Eric — 12/19/2024 5:08:19 PM

Boeing & Aerospace
Business
International Trade
Nation & World

Boeing wins $36 billion deal from Turkey, trumping Airbus

Dec. 19, 2024 at 1:37 pm

A Boeing 737 Max 10 at the Farnborough International Airshow in the United Kingdom last summer. (Jason Alden / Bloomberg)

A Boeing 737 MAX 10 aircraft during a flight demonstration at the Paris Air Show in 2023. (Bloomberg)

By
Julie Johnsson
and
Siddharth Philip
Bloomberg

Boeing won an order valued at $36 billion from Pegasus Airlines, in its biggest commitment so far this year that deals a blow to rival Airbus, previously the preferred choice for the Turkish low-cost airline.

The carrier placed firm orders for 100 of the as-yet uncertified 737 MAX 10 model that it will begin receiving in 2028, with options for another 100, it said in a stock exchange filing. The total value of the agreement assumes that all options are converted, and is based on list prices rather than the market values typically negotiated by customers.

Related

More on Boeing

China Airlines orders Boeing, Airbus jets in $11.9 billion deal
Boeing resumes 767 and 777 jet production in Seattle area
Boeing resumes 737 MAX production in Renton after end of Machinists strike

The largest order in Pegasus’s history is an important win for Boeing as it works to overcome the fallout from a prolonged strike and a near-catastrophic accident at the start of the year. It also marks a strategic reversal for Pegasus after the carrier said less than two years ago that it wanted to become an all-Airbus operator.

Related

More on Boeing

China Airlines orders Boeing, Airbus jets in $11.9 billion deal

Boeing’s shares rose as much as 4% as of 2:33 p.m. in New York, reaching the highest intraday price in four months. The planemaker is working to end an otherwise dismal year on a high note, having sold 14 of its 777X jets to China Airlines earlier on Thursday. The Taiwanese flag carrier also ordered 10 A350-1000 jets from Airbus SE.

More than four months into Kelly Ortberg’s term as Boeing’s chief executive officer, “customers are also starting to feel more confident,” said Jefferies analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu. The company is poised for a “a fresh start into 2025” with its factories now back to full production after a lengthy strike, she said in an interview.

The stock has risen nearly 30% since mid-November as the planemaker surpassed two key milestones: ending a 53-day strike that shut down most of its airplane manufacturing and raising $24 billion to shore up its liquidity.

The long-delayed 737 Max 10 is the largest variant of Boeing’s popular single-aisle family, and carriers including United Airline Holdings Inc and Virgin Australia have switched out some of their orders for the model due to uncertainty about when it will be certified. Bloomberg News reported this month that Qatar Airways was looking to strike orders for the model off its books.

Pegasus said the “general anticipation” is for the Max 10 to be certified in the second half of 2025. The US planemaker’s final 737 Max models are running years behind schedule as they face tougher regulatory scrutiny, including a requirement to redesign of the jet engines anti-ice system.

Jefferies doesn’t expect the stretched 737 to begin commercial service until 2026. And that’s presuming the certification doesn’t get hung up on fresh turmoil in Washington DC, Kahyaoglu said, with a potential government shutdown looming and the head of the US Federal Aviation Administration set to step down when President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.

Pegasus said in 2023 that it was working on a fresh aircraft order to expand and go further afield into destinations in North Africa and the Baltic states. The carrier has a fleet of more than 100 planes, including 16 older 737 NGs and the rest made up of Airbus A320 family jets, according to its website.

The airline also has outstanding orders for another 53 A321 jets, according to Airbus’s tally. So far this year, Boeing has received 427 gross orders, and the company has a backlog for the Max 10 variant of 1,109 units.

“Pegasus continues to work with both Boeing and Airbus,” the company said via email. “This order strengthens the collaboration with Boeing, but the relationship with Airbus remains intact. The aircraft deliveries with Airbus will continue until the end of 2029.”

Turkey has ambitions to turn itself into a bigger tourism and business hub, using its new Istanbul airport as a global airfield that can rival those in the Middle East, including Dubai and Doha in Qatar. Pegasus operates from Sabiha Gokcen airport, Istanbul’s second hub, which recently opened a second runway.

The deal also stands to deepen corporate and political ties between the two countries. Pegasus said the order will “open new doors and create production and export opportunities both for Turkish manufacturers and for the wider aviation industry,” implying that local companies and industries stand to share in some of the value chain.

Airbus has also gained an important foothold in Turkey, winning an order for 220 aircraft a year ago from flag carrier Turkish Airlines that consisted of 150 A321 narrow-body jets and 70 of the A350 widebody.

–With assistance from Leen Al-Rashdan.

(Updates shares, adds analyst, airline comment from the fourth paragraph.)

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.

seattletimes.com

This story was originally published at bloomberg.com. Read it here

[Selectric II] Boeing to Spend $1 Billion on 787 Dreamliner Manufacturing Expansion By Aaro...

Selectric II — 12/13/2024 8:47:31 PM

Boeing to Spend $1 Billion on 787 Dreamliner Manufacturing Expansion

By
Aaron McDade

Published December 13, 2024
08:04 AM EST

Jennifer Buchanan / Pool / AFP / Getty Images

Key Takeaways

Boeing said it would invest $1 billion in expanding its operations in South Carolina, where it produces the 787 Dreamliner.
The company is looking to increase production of the plane to 10 per month by 2026, with expansions to the South Carolina facilities online by early 2027.
Boeing has faced a number of production issues this year, including a nearly two-month strike at its Washington facilities.

Boeing ( BA) is investing $1 billion in expanding its facilities in South Carolina to ramp up production of the 787 Dreamliner.

The airplane manufacturer said late Thursday that it expects to produce 10 Dreamliner planes per month by 2026, and said the upgrades to the South Carolina facility should be completed by early 2027.1 The company said the project will create roughly 500 jobs over the next five years.

Boeing has been wracked with production issues this year, from the forced slowing of production following a series of safety incidents to start the year, to a strike at its Washington plants that lasted nearly two months and ended in November.

The company made cost-cutting moves including thousands of layoffs during the strike. Boeing reportedly only recently resumed production of the 737 Max series of planes just over a month after the strike ended, with a current order backlog of over 4,000 planes, according to Reuters.2

Boeing shares were little changed Friday morning. They are down about 35% this year.

investopedia.com

[Selectric II] Is it finally time to start tiptoeing back into BA? I did, for better or worse.

Selectric II — 12/13/2024 9:31:18 AM

[longz] New details emerge after Boeing plane makes emergency landing at Mirabel airport...

longz — 11/29/2024 2:01:11 PM

New details emerge after Boeing plane makes emergency landing at Mirabel airport | CTV News

[longz] [graphic]

longz — 11/24/2024 5:06:59 PM

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Business FAA team recommends Boeing MAX design change and p...

Eric — 11/24/2024 7:24:11 AM

Boeing & Aerospace
Business

FAA team recommends Boeing MAX design change and pilot notification

Nov. 22, 2024 at 7:47 pm

The LEAP engine on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft at Los Angeles International Airport in January. A new safety feature disconnects the large fan at the front from the engine core if fan blades are broken, causing an unbalanced load.... (Eric Thayer / Bloomberg)

By
Dominic Gates
Seattle Times aerospace reporter

A small team of accident investigators within the Federal Aviation Administration have internally recommended a design change to fix an engine vulnerability on Boeing’s 737 MAX.

The same team also wants pilots to be fully informed of the risk and is asking for takeoff procedures to be modified until the design change is implemented.

An internal memo dated Oct. 28 from the FAA’s Office of Accident Investigation and Prevention outlines six recommendations to avert “the potential catastrophic risk” of smoke and noxious fumes spewing into the cockpit if a bird slams into the engine and activates a specific engine component.

The investigators recommend that FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker “require a design change which detects the immediate impulse of a bird-strike” or broken engine fan blade and automatically closes the affected engine’s airflow to the interior of the airplane “as quickly as possible.”

The memo does not represent a final FAA decision. The gravity of the risk and what should be done about it is still being discussed internally.

The safety regulator said Thursday that it will convene a Corrective Action Review Board in the coming weeks to examine the data and the investigators’ recommendations, and decide what action to take.

Ahead of that determination, the leaked FAA investigator recommendations have been circulating in aviation safety circles this week. They make clear the reason for a proposed change to takeoff procedures first reported Thursday by The Seattle Times.

The memo recommends that, until the permanent fix is available, all MAX pilots should be instructed via an emergency airworthiness directive to amend their takeoff procedures.

Two new pretakeoff options are offered. One would require the pilots to close off the airflow from the left engine, which goes directly into the cockpit.

Smoke from that engine could “quickly expose the flight deck to high concentrations of potentially lethal aerosolized chemicals at a critical phase of flight,” the memo states.

That smoke might incapacitate the pilots and cause the loss of the airplane as they struggle to handle the aircraft with one engine destroyed while close to the ground.

The second, more conservative option offered is to close off the airflow from both engines. The airflow from the right engine goes into the passenger cabin.

Dennis Tajer, spokesperson for the American Airlines pilot union, said he’d strongly favor this option. “We have to protect the passengers,” he said. “They shouldn’t be doused with lethal chemicals.”

Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation safety consultant and former FAA accident investigator who once ran the Office of Accident Investigation and Prevention, said the office that issued the memo consists of about eight people.

He said such safety recommendations typically go through a very deliberative review by different teams before a decision is made and the memo should not have been leaked before that.

“These two events certainly sound serious to me,” Guzzetti said. “However, there could be people inside the FAA — engine certification experts, engineers, test pilots — that would say this is not needed.”

“I just think this is part of the sausage-making of hard aviation safety decisions,” he added.

In contrast, American’s Tajer welcomes the leaking of the memo.

“Thank goodness they did this. That’s hero action,” Tajer said. “At least somebody gets that safety must be the No. 1 goal.”

It was American and Southwest pilots who were concerned about the two incidents that first drew public attention to this engine issue in June.

“We are relieved to see some of the things that we were concerned about being documented,” Tajer said. “Now we are going to demand to be a part of this process” to work with regulators and find the best safety solution.

Two serious emergencies in nine months

The recommendations in the memo are a detailed response to two serious emergency incidents on 737 MAXs flown by Southwest Airlines last year when each jet lost an engine on takeoff after colliding with a large bird.

Both emergencies became very serious when heavy smoke and fumes from burning engine oil flooded inside the airplanes.

On a March 2023 flight taking off from Havana, smoke poured into the passenger cabin after a bird struck the right engine on takeoff.

In December, on a flight out of New Orleans, a large bald eagle estimated to weigh more than 12 pounds struck the left engine on takeoff and smoke filled the cockpit.

Bird strikes on engines are not uncommon; engines have to be tested and certified to withstand the impact of birds weighing up to 8 pounds.

Engines of older design more easily sustain serious damage. But strikes that destroy the robust carbon-composite fan blades on the more modern engines are very rare.

Still, the FAA memo states that Boeing needs “to reassess their projected probabilities” of such a destructive event, given that the Southwest incidents occurred just nine months apart.

A new safety feature on the engine

The internal FAA memo, reviewed by The Seattle Times, is highly critical of Boeing for not informing pilots about the existence of the engine component that activates when the engine is severely damaged, called the load reduction device, or LRD.

This device is new on the MAX’s LEAP engine, which is designed and built by CFM International, a joint venture of GE Aerospace and Safran of France. It was not part of the engine on the prior 737 model.

Ironically, the LRD is a safety feature designed to mitigate harm if an engine fan is badly damaged in flight, say by a bird strike.

A broken fan blade will throw the engine’s rotating parts off balance and cause heavy vibration throughout the intricate mechanism that can lead to further damage.

When this happens, the new LRD activates, shearing some bolts and disconnecting the fan from the engine core. The fan blades then spin freely and the vibration is minimized.

In the Southwest incidents, the violence of the engine fan breakup caused an oil leak from the engine sump. Ignited by the hot engine, the burning oil then sent smoke and fumes inside the airplane.

The memo cites a Boeing presentation stating that “the release of oil from the sump is an expected result of LRD activation.”

CFM says some version of an LRD has been widely used across the industry for more than 20 years and that it operated as designed in the two Southwest flight incidents.

Various models of the 777, 747 and 787 also have such an engine component. So does the larger version of LEAP engine on the Airbus A320neo jet family.

No similar incidents have been reported on the A320neo jets. Although their engines are similar in design, the way the airflow from the engines is controlled can be different.

A person familiar with the details of the engine system, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of ongoing discussions between safety regulators, Boeing and engine maker CFM International, said a design change to address the smoke risk would not require any physical modification to the engine.

Instead, a software change would adjust the signal to the aircraft’s computers about what to do with the airflow valves when a fan blade breaks off, whether due to a bird strike or some other reason.

If such a software design change is settled upon, it must go through a stringent certification process that will include assessment of potential unintended consequences.

This summer, Airbus certified the latest version of its A320neo jet family, the A321XLR. Coming after the two Southwest incidents, the European regulator would have required Airbus to show that the same heavy bird strike scenario was not a substantial risk.

Boeing will have to do the same when the FAA certifies the two forthcoming MAX models, the MAX 7 and MAX 10.

And Boeing must once again consider how much information to share with pilots and airlines. There was nothing in the pilot manuals about the LRD.

The leaked FAA memo compares this to the similar omission from pilot manuals of any mention of the flight control system at the center of the two deadly MAX crashes, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS.

“Much like MCAS, the discovery that LRD is not known to pilots is very concerning,” the memo states.

The investigators recommend that the FAA “review all novel and unique 737 MAX design features and ensure they are adequately communicated in pilot operating manuals.”

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com; Dominic Gates is a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist for The Seattle Times.

seattletimes.com

[Jeff Vayda] How about bringing some thought/discussion to the thread rather than just retwit...

Jeff Vayda — 11/22/2024 1:27:11 PM

How about bringing some thought/discussion to the thread rather than just retwitting....rexing...whatever it is called. There is always more nuance to discover to any story for one who cares enough to do some independent information research. Ive been involved in enough contracts (civilian and government) to know no one's hands are clean. SCREAMING wont get thoughtful change. The idea of DOGE is tempting, but I'd offer up to start the irony of 2 billionairs leading the effort. Open the door into what 'programs' they are actually targeting and what they are gripping about it all gets laughable as a serious Budget cost cutting exercise. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/musk-ramaswamy-doge-500-billion-spending-where-they-will-cut/ or forbes.com

[longz] (1) Mario Nawfal on X: "??ANOTHER REASON WHY DOGE IS IMPORTANT: LOOK HOW BOEING ...

longz — 11/22/2024 12:34:55 PM

(1) Mario Nawfal on X: "??ANOTHER REASON WHY DOGE IS IMPORTANT: LOOK HOW BOEING IS RIPPING OFF THE PENTAGON A Pentagon audit found Boeing overcharged the Air Force millions for spare parts, including a 10,319% markup on a single screw and nearly 8,000% for soap dispensers. The investigation, spurred t.co; / X

[X]

🚨ANOTHER REASON WHY DOGE IS IMPORTANT: LOOK HOW BOEING IS RIPPING OFF THE PENTAGON

A Pentagon audit found Boeing overcharged the Air Force millions for spare parts, including a 10,319% markup on a single screw and nearly 8,000% for soap dispensers.

The investigation, spurred… pic.twitter.com/ftxTEsKm6f
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) November 22, 2024

[/X]

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Business Boeing lays off more than 2,000 Washington workers ...

Eric — 11/19/2024 2:06:31 PM

Boeing & Aerospace
Business

Boeing lays off more than 2,000 Washington workers

Nov. 18, 2024 at 9:28 am Updated Nov. 18, 2024 at 6:46 pm

A cargo door is installed on a 777 at the Boeing Everett Production Facility in June. Boeing has laid off 2,199 workers in Washington, according to a notice filed Monday with the state’s Employment Security Department. (Jennifer Buchanan / The Seattle Times)

By
Lauren Rosenblatt
Seattle Times business reporter

Boeing has laid off 2,199 workers in Washington, according to a notice filed Monday with the state’s Employment Security Department, as upheaval at the struggling aerospace giant continues to rattle local economies around the region.

The cuts — part of a companywide effort to reduce Boeing’s workforce by 10%, or 17,000 jobs — hit workers in 25 Washington cities, according to a copy of a notice that Boeing filed with the state.

Everett, where Boeing has the highest concentration of workers among its 66,000-person Washington labor force, saw the greatest number of layoffs. According to the notice, Boeing cut 1,160 people from its facilities in Everett, which employ roughly 35,000 workers.

Boeing also laid off 337 workers in Renton, where it employs roughly 13,000 people. The layoffs hit 235 people in Seattle, 148 in Tukwila, 136 in Auburn and 79 in Kent, among many other cities that saw a handful of job cuts.

The layoffs included engineers, human resources, IT, office administrators, and health and safety roles, among many job titles, according to the 27-page document listing each affected position.

“The Boeing Company has made the difficult decision to reduce its workforce,” Elizabeth French, a workplace specialist at Boeing, wrote in the company’s letter to the Washington Employment Security Department. “This decision is expected to result in the permanent layoff of approximately 2,199 employees at the Company’s Washington state locations.”

Managers began scheduling meetings and delivering pink slips over three days last week, starting on Wednesday. The cuts are far-reaching, hitting workers at Boeing facilities across the country, from Washington to Missouri to Arizona to South Carolina. They also appeared to impact workers in all three of Boeing’s divisions: commercial airplanes; defense, space and security; and global services.

The deep cuts, uncertainty about how the company chooses which roles to eliminate and concern that more layoffs will follow has already significantly eroded employee morale, workers told The Seattle Times.

One worker, who was laid off on Friday and asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation, described the scene at Boeing’s South Carolina campus as “like a funeral home.”

The worker, a process analyst, said it seemed the decision about who to cut was coming from levels much higher than his own managers, which left him concerned about what would happen if he and his co-workers weren’t there to fulfill their normal job responsibilities.

“It’s hard to work that hard for that long for a company, and then find out that somebody gave me a layoff (notice) and they don’t even know who I am,” said the worker, who has been at Boeing for 13 years. “They don’t know who I am, or what I do, or how many people I help to do their job.”

“There’s a lot of good talent that will be lost,” the worker said of conversations with other colleagues who are also cut.

Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg announced the job cuts in October, part of a sweeping announcement that included changes to the company’s production plans and a sobering directive that the company must “reset our workforce levels to align with our financial reality.”

Boeing lost $6.2 billion in the third quarter this year, according to the most recent financial results, and risked a credit rating downgrade.

Ortberg’s announcement came as Boeing’s Puget Sound factories sat idle amid a strike by the company’s unionized Machinists workforce. But the job cuts were not a result of the eight-week strike, which ended earlier this month, Ortberg said on an October analysts call.

The layoffs were instead a result of overstaffing and targeted at reducing inefficiencies in the company, he continued.

The cuts were not expected to hit members of the Machinists union that returned to the factory this month. But the layoffs did impact Boeing’s professional aerospace union, which includes technicians and engineers.

The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, or SPEEA, said last week that 438 members had received layoff notices. The union has 17,000 members largely based in Washington, with some in Oregon, California and Utah.

Most employees who were notified of the layoffs will remain on payroll through mid-January, Boeing said last week.

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN, notice the company filed Monday listed Dec. 20 as the layoff start date. But, a spokesperson for the state said only a handful of workers will leave then and the majority will have a layoff start date of Jan. 17.

Laid-off employees will receive career transition services and subsidized health care benefits for up to three months, Boeing said. Workers will also receive severance pay, which will typically be one week of pay for every year of service.

The company is considering a second round of job cuts “if needed,” according to an internal slide deck shared with The Seattle Times. Those workers will be notified in December and remain on payroll through mid-February.

In Washington, the layoffs will have a “multiplier” effect on Boeing suppliers and other industries in the region, said Suzanne Dale Estey, the executive director of the trade group Washington Economic Development Association.

She expected to see blows to car sales, real estate, restaurants and health care organizations, though the exact impact will take time to show up as workers remain on payroll, apply for unemployment benefits and look for other jobs in the area.

“History shows us that there will be impacts to (Boeing’s) supply chain” and the aerospace industry in the region, she said. “I think it will take a while for all of that to unfold.”

The aerospace industry in Washington generated $71 billion in business revenues and supported 194,000 jobs last year, according to a study from the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and consulting firm Community Attributes.

Aerospace workers in Lynnwood and Everett spent $36.5 million on car sales, the equivalent of roughly 1,160 cars, the study found. In Auburn and Renton, aerospace workers directly supported 420 restaurant jobs and accounted for 2.4% of all restaurant sales. In Seattle and the Eastside, retail sales by aerospace workers reached nearly $270 million, which sustained 1 million square feet of retail space.

The study estimated Washington had 77,400 aerospace industry workers last year, including 66,000 at Boeing. It expected that number to grow to 81,800 based on industry growth in 2023, before Boeing’s tumultuous year that took a turn when a fuselage panel blew off a 737 MAX plane in January.

Echoing Ortberg’s sentiment last month, a Boeing spokesperson said Wednesday, on the first day layoff notices were delivered, “as previously announced, we are adjusting our workforce levels to align with our financial reality and a more focused set of priorities. We are committed to ensuring our employees have support during this challenging time.”

Dale Estey, of the Washington Economic Development Association, said the region is somewhat used to fluctuations in Boeing’s head count and aerospace employment generally. Because of that, other suppliers have started to diversify, allowing them to better weather changes at Boeing.

As an example, she pointed to one supplier in Renton that makes coils. They started making their coils for motorcycles as well, Dale Estey said, to bring in additional revenue.

“The fluctuations in the aerospace industry have been a norm for Washington state and the Seattle region, but we’ve always been able to endure,” she said. “We have a long-haul perspective on this and have the infrastructure, and the talent and incredible research institutions and the supply chain that will help us endure this.”

Though the recent Machinists strike strained Boeing’s finances, the company was already in a dire financial situation as it struggled to recover from two deadly crashes involving the 737 MAX plane in 2018 and 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

That strain ratcheted up this year after a fuselage panel blew off a 737 MAX in January. Investigators have determined four bolts meant to hold the panel in place were missing after Boeing mechanics removed and reinstalled the panel for maintenance.

Since then, Boeing has slowed production as it focuses on quality and safety. The Federal Aviation Administration capped production of the 737 MAX at 38 planes per month, and Boeing has yet to reach that threshold.

“We know the financial situation of Boeing hasn’t gotten any better in the last few months, so these numbers were expected,” said Thomas Gilbert, a business professor at the University of Washington. “Boeing is going to try to control its finances every which way it can, and this does mean labor cost decreases.”

In other efforts to shore up its balance sheet, Boeing raised $21 billion in a stock sale in October and has considered shutting down or selling off other parts of its business to keep its focus on “areas that are core to who we are,” Ortberg said when announcing the cuts.

Gilbert, from UW, said layoffs, divestment and cost-cutting are a normal course for big businesses as they grow and add layers of middle management. He compared it to a household trying to save money; every Starbucks latte that they cut out would make a difference.

He was optimistic about Boeing’s future, pointing to its backlog of 5,400 commercial airplane orders.

“People want the product,” Gilbert said. “In some ways, Boeing is really lucky in that sense. It just needs to get its house in order.”

Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com.

seattletimes.com

[Eric] Boeing & Aerospace Business Employees across Boeing face sweeping layoffs this ...

Eric — 11/12/2024 6:56:03 PM

Boeing & Aerospace
Business

Employees across Boeing face sweeping layoffs this week

Nov. 12, 2024 at 9:00 am Updated Nov. 12, 2024 at 9:00 am

Air Force KC-46 air-to-air refueling tankers at Boeing’s Everett Modification Center at the south end of Paine Field, where Boeing installs the refueling and other military systems on its 767 airframe. In the coming layoffs, engineering support is being cut across a range of military and commercial programs. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times, 2021)

By
Dominic Gates
Seattle Times aerospace reporter

Boeing employees will learn Wednesday who will lose their jobs in mid-January in the round of layoffs Boeing announced last month. The cuts will be broadly spread across the company and, despite some expectations earlier, engineers and production workers won’t be exempt.

On an earnings call late last month, new Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said that to “reset priorities and create a leaner, more focused organization,” a 10% workforce cut would target overhead and “nonessential” positions, not front-line workers designing and building airplanes.

“We’re going to really focus this workforce reduction in streamlining those overhead activities, consolidating things that can be consolidated,” he said.

“I wouldn’t think of it like we’re going to take people off production or out of the engineering labs,” Ortberg added. “That’s not our intent.”

But a Boeing senior engineering manager in St. Louis said the cuts in the works target a roughly 10% reduction across the engineers supporting military programs, including the F-15 and F/A-18 jet fighters and the Navy’s P-8 submarine hunter, which is built in Renton with military systems installed in Seattle.

Those engineering organizations will shrink, said the manager, who asked not to be identified to protect his job. “If the idea in Kelly’s mind is cutting overhead and programs will not be impacted, that’s not what’s happening.”

He said research and development work, and production programs, “will all bleed a little.”

Still, it’s clear non-front-line positions will suffer bigger losses.

And white-collar staff working remotely may be particularly targeted as Ortberg tries to get the workforce connected and aligned with his new direction.

A manager of a small team of about 15 people, all working remotely — and ironically focused on ways to improve efficiency in program management — told one employee to expect a 30% cut in his team.

“If we are not holding a wrench, if we’re considered overhead, it’s about 30%,” said the employee, who also asked not to be identified to protect his job. The reduction for “people working on planes might be less than 5%.”

Boeing decided not to lay off Machinists during the strike, which could have complicated negotiations. However, with the strike ended Nov. 4, some Machinists may also be cut even though Boeing now desperately needs to increase production rates and bring in cash.

Boeing hired mechanics aggressively over the past two years in anticipation of higher production rates that have not materialized.

Before the blowout of a MAX fuselage panel on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 in January, Boeing had targeted delivering 38 MAXs a month out of the Renton factory by year end. That rate is now pushed into the second half of next year.

With all Machinists back at work as of Tuesday, production is expected to ramp up only slowly.

Suppliers will take time to gear up again. Some newer hires will have to go through retraining.

And the Federal Aviation Administration put Boeing on notice this week that it must ramp up carefully and methodically to maintain safety and quality.

The FAA in a statement said it “will further strengthen and target our oversight as the company begins its return-to-work.”

Still, Jon Holden, president of the Machinists union 751, in a news conference on the night the strike ended, said “layoffs right now would be very shortsighted.”

With a current order backlog of almost 5,500 airplanes, he said “it’s important to get our membership back in the factories, build the (production) rates and start delivering airplanes.”

“They need us to build them,” Holden added. “I hope the company can reconsider.”

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com; Dominic Gates is a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist for The Seattle Times.

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