Boeing stock still soaring
Published 5:28 pm Monday, September 24, 2007
While I wandered through the Pacific Northwest wilderness last week on vacation, the Boeing Co. battled charges from a former employee that its 787 isn’t crashworthy.
Vince Weldon, a longtime Boeing engineer who was fired by the company, laid out his case first in a letter to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and then to journalist Dan Rather. Weldon’s allegations center around the safety of composites used by Boeing in its Dreamliner.
Wall Street, however, didn’t seem to share Weldon’s concerns (and neither did Airbus). After a week without access to Boeing news, the first thing I noticed was not the controversy over the 787’s composites but the $3 gain that once again lifted Boeing’s stock over the $100 hump.
On Friday, Sept. 14, Boeing’s stock closed at $99.35. At the end of last week, investors pushed the price up more than $3 to $102.59. Today, it closed up 46 cents at $103.05.
This is the second time in the past month when Wall Street rallied behind Boeing despite potentially damaging developments for the aerospace giant’s new jet. On Sept. 5, Boeing executives announced a delay to the 787’s first flight, hence its flight test program. But assurances from the company that its Dreamliner would be delivered on time to Japan’s All Nippon Airways next May seemed to soothe jitters.
While rivals Boeing and Airbus are on the same page about the crashworthiness of composites, they aren’t in agreement when it comes to the U.S. Air Force tanker competition.
Airbus’s parent company, EADS, along with Northrop Grumman, touted the advantage of their KC-30 tanker over Boeing’s KC-767 at a National Press Club briefing last week. The duo also will host a panel of retired Air Force generals, who, presumably will talk about why the Air Force should award Northrop-EADS the $40 billion contract to replace 179 aerial refueling tankers.
