EVERETT — The first test plane for the Boeing Co.’s KC-46A aerial-refueling tanker program is on the flight line at Paine Field next to the company’s factory.
“We’re doing final prep for first flight on tanker,” Boeing Chief Operating Officer Dennis Muilenburg said Wednesday during an investors conference in New York.
The first test flight had been planned for this past summer, but wiring problems delayed the schedule.
The company is developing the KC-46, derived from the Boeing 767 passenger jet, for the U.S. Air Force as a replacement for aging KC-135 tankers, which are Boeing 707 derivatives. The Air Force plans to order 179 KC-46s from Boeing to be delivered over 10 years.
The Air Force also plans to buy a couple of hundred more tankers in two subsequent procurement programs. By the end, it will have replaced the entire tanker fleet, which consists of KC-135s and larger KC-10s, which were derived from the DC-10.
Boeing must deliver the first 18 KC-46s to the military in August 2017.
The wiring issues “have now been resolved and closed out,” Muilenburg said at the Credit Suisse Global Industrials Conference in New York. “That airplane is done. We completed factory functional test. That airplane has now rolled out of the factory.”
Muilenburg also said he is confident the company can get enough orders for in-production 777 models to keep that assembly line busy at the current rate of 100 airplanes a year, through 2020. That is when the company expects to make the first delivery of a successor, the 777X.
At the current production rate, Boeing has enough orders to keep the line moving through 2016. That leaves several years for the company to bridge.
Many aerospace analysts said they expect Boeing will have to slow 777 production from 8.3 airplanes a month now to about five per month to bridge the gap.
“We’re very confident we’ll be able to fill that bridge,” Muilenburg said. “The bridge we need to build between now and then is about 600 airplanes in total. Three hundred of those are in firm backlog today, leaves 300 to go.”
Of those, customers have options to buy about 150, and Boeing has more than a dozen “very credible proposals” to sell the remaining slots, he said.
Boeing needs to sell between 40 and 60 777s each year to bridge the gap, Muilenburg said.
This year it sold 57.
Dan Catchpole: 425-339-3454; dcatchpole@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @dcatchpole.
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