Boeing to announce new product Tuesday

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, May 22, 2005

First post: Noon-ish

Boeing’s scheduling a “new product” announcement for Tuesday morning. That’s all I know about it at the moment. My guess is that Boeing’s going to formally launch the 777 Freighter program. (Perhaps they’ve landed a third buyer?) There’s an outside change they could announce they’ve decided to go forward with the 747 Advanced, but I suspect they’re going to hold off on that till Paris.

If I find out anything, it’ll be in Tuesday’s Herald.

…

Update: 1:35 p.m.

OK, two out of three aerospace analysts surveyed speculate that Boeing will launch the 747 Advanced tomorrow. But it was mostly a matter of deductive reasoning — basically, they don’t think Boeing would go to the trouble of alerting reporters to an upcoming announcement unless they planned something big that will make big headlines, and the 777 Freighter doesn’t qualify. Neither would a new airplane service. So — 747 Advanced is the only other thing left.

The third analyst said he hadn’t the slightest and didn’t want to guess. But, just to clarify, this will be a Commercial Airplanes announcement, so it’s not going to be a new fighter jet or whatever from IDS.

So, there you have it. Probably won’t be a story in Tuesday’s paper, unless I get some information in the next hour or two that points conclusively one way or the other.

6:20 p.m. update

Seems like I was right the first time. Wall Street Journal says Boeing will formally launch the 777 Freighter Tuesday morning.