Qantas deal still in the hopper

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, January 22, 2006

Bear with me today folks … I’m typing kinda slow because I think I sprained my wrist high-fiving Seahawks fans in down in Pioneer Square last night. (heh heh)

Anyway … today’s topic: Boeing’s big 787 order from Qantas last month. As you recall, the Australian airline was widely expected to also order long-range 777s from Boeing, but instead passed on them. No worries, Boeing executives said. They’ll be back to buy them later.

(Here’s a link to what I had to say about that at the time: http://www.heraldnet.com/blog/blog_edit2.cfm?bid=840 Key Quote: “I talked with some Boeing folks about this last night and this morning and can say the company is quite confident Qantas will place a 777-200LR order in the not-so-distant future. We’ll see.”)

It’s looking like they were right. Air Transport World reports http://www.atwonline.com/news/story.html?storyID=3780 that the deal is still being evaluated.

Key Quote: “Qantas CFO Peter Gregg told (ATW Online) that the 777-200LR is ‘definitely under serious evaluation,’ although he was coy on the finer details of the operational options under examination. … Analysts expect it to order between 10 and 15 777-200LRs.”

Oh and speaking of the Seahawks’ bruising march through Carolina … both Boeing Commercial Airplanes chief Alan Mulally and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray made note of the fact that the Panthers flew an Airbus A321 out for the game. (I had breakfast with both of them — well, me and about 80 of our closest friends.)

Said Murray: “I knew who was going to win that game when I saw they flew in here on that Airbus.”