THERE are not many businesses in which the next six years’ worth of customers form an orderly queue, putting down fat deposits and topping them up with further instalments as they wait in line. But that is Boeing’s fortunate position. On January 25th it announced a 21% rise in annual net profits, to $4 billion.
Last September, after three years of delay, Boeing made the first deliveries of its newest model, the 787 Dreamliner. A revamped version of the trusty but ageing 747 jumbo has also arrived, two years late. A few airlines got fed up and cancelled, but most had little choice but to keep waiting. Boeing’s main rival, Airbus, has an even longer backlog—up to eight years at current production rates. And the delivery schedule for Airbus’s answer to the Dreamliner, the A350, has been slipping.
Last year, straining to ramp up production to meet soaring demand, the two big planemakers turned out a record 1,011 airliners between them. But for every plane they delivered, they won more than two fresh orders (net of cancellations), so the queue got longer. On January 25th Boeing won its largest-ever order from Europe: Norwegian Air Shuttle is to buy 122 planes worth $11.4 billion at list prices.
The lion’s share of 2011’s advance orders were for the A320neo, a re-engined version of Airbus’s short-haul airliner, which should enter service in 2015. This year the plane most in demand looks to be the 737MAX, a re-engined version of Boeing’s short-haul plane, deliveries of which are due to start in 2017.
At Boeing’s Renton factory near Seattle the existing version of the 737 is now being turned out at a record rate of 35 a month, after a recent speeding-up of the two assembly lines. At the front of assembly line number one, a plane destined for flydubai, an airline that can’t afford capital letters, is ready to roll. Behind it is the latest addition to Ryanair’s huge fleet of 737s, which has just had its engines fitted. Next, a Korean Air plane which is about to receive rows of seats; then an Azerbaijan Airlines jet, its toilet cubicles lined up alongside ready for installation. The plan is to increase the production rate further, to 42 a month by 2014. Fortunately, there is space to squeeze a third assembly line into the giant hangar.
Likewise, at Boeing’s Everett factory to the north of Seattle and another plant in South Carolina, plans are afoot to churn out more of the company’s bigger jets, including the 787. But the 40-odd unfinished Dreamliners scattered around the Everett campus and elsewhere are a reminder of how such attempts to ramp up production can go wrong. Having first suffered from a worldwide shortage of the fasteners that hold bits of the plane together, the 787 was then held back further by other mishaps, including faulty horizontal stabilisers sent by an Italian supplier. Boeing is struggling to correct the problems on the unfinished planes even as it strives to get its production lines turning out ten fault-free 787s a month by the end of next year.
The head of Boeing’s commercial-airliner division, Jim Albaugh, admits that with hindsight too much of the Dreamliner programme was contracted out to other firms. Some work has been brought back in-house so that it can be more closely supervised. The planemaker has also set up a “war room” that constantly monitors the world’s supply of aircraft parts and raw materials. It has signed a long-term deal with a Russian metals firm to ensure a steady supply of crucial components made from titanium. And it has hired hundreds of “examiners” to visit suppliers, to check that they are building up production to meet Boeing’s increasing needs and chivvy them along if not.
Boeing’s assembly plants are the final stage in a long and hugely complex global supply chain. It has about 1,200 “tier-one” suppliers, which provide parts directly to the planemaker from 5,400 factories in 40 countries. These in turn are fed by thousands more “tier-two” suppliers, which themselves receive parts from countless others. Beverly Wyse, who oversees production of the 737, admits that it has sometimes been a job to persuade all these suppliers to invest enough to meet future demand. To do so, Boeing has had to learn to be more open with them about its production plans, and a bit less paranoid about whether such information might reach the ears of its competitors.
Even with all these new measures in place, Boeing’s plans to boost production of the Dreamliner remain “hugely ambitious”, reckons Richard Aboulafia of Teal Group, an aviation consultancy. He wonders if the planemaker is serious about its target of making ten of them a month, or whether it is just bandying about an unrealistic figure to rev up its suppliers. “Not true,” retorts Mr Albaugh. Boeing has every intention of reaching the goal, he says.
Fasten your seat belts
Still, with the world economy looking wobbly and the euro-area crisis far from over, might suppliers not have good reason to fear that the recent surge in aircraft orders could go into reverse thrust? Myles Walton, an aerospace analyst at Deutsche Bank, believes that both Boeing and Airbus have quietly begun double-booking some of their delivery slots, in case a customer collapses. He reckons they have done enough of this to cope with the worst imaginable recession in Europe.
Perhaps the biggest risk on the horizon would be a sustained surge in the price of oil, which could send airlines into a tailspin of losses and bankruptcy. So far, though, the chief worry for Boeing and its main rival is how to get their products flying out of the door faster.
