No 797 — for now, anyway
Published 9:00 pm Sunday, November 6, 2005
Boeing Blogger-in-chief Randy Baseler http://www.boeing.com/randy/ tries to quash speculation about the imminent arrival of a 737 replacement plane in his latest blog posting.
Key Quote: “It’s just a matter of timing. Market timing and our timing. And right now the market isn’t calling for it and we have no firm schedule for replacing our single-aisle product line.”
A little background on this: There is a bit of buzz in the industry that Boeing has a 737 replacement on the drawing board. The smart money says the company will take a whole lot of elements from the 787 and apply them to a 110- to 190-seat family of composite-hulled single-aisles sometime around 2012 or so. Some are even going as far as to call this the “797.”
However, some Boeing folks I chat with say the reason the rumors are flying have more to do with Airbus marketing than anything else. According to them, the Euros are eagerly talking up this notion that Boeing’s about to scrap the 737 because it makes the 737 seem old, outdated and almost obsolete — and thus less desirable than the A320. In addition, if Boeing WERE to end production of Next-Gen 737s, it would hurt the resale value of the planes airlines have in their fleets now — which also tends to make the A320 look like a smarter buy.
So … expect every Boeing sales and/or marketing person you meet to firmly deny the company has any kind of plans for replacing the 737 any time soon — at least until both the 787 and 747 Advanced have got off the ground.
