Tanker talk
Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, December 6, 2005
Boeing Blogger-in-chief Randy Baseler tells Reuters http://today.reuters.com/business/newsArticle.aspx?type=basicIndustries&storyID=nN06392652 that there’s still life in the Everett 767 assembly line, and the company is confident it will someday build 767 tankers for the U.S. Air Force.
Key Quote: “Randy Baseler, Boeing’s vice president of marketing for commercial airplanes, said the company is phasing out the 767 as a passenger aircraft in favor of the 787 but 767 production continues for now on the strength of 14 orders in 2005. … ‘We will keep the (767) platform going if it continues to be a military platform, whether it is for a tanker or for other applications as freighters or other things,’ Baseler said.”
The Wall Street Journal, you may have heard, reported this week something I wrote about a couple months ago — the Air Force is toying with a 777 tanker instead of one based on the 767.
There’s been an increasing amount of chatter about 777 tankers, the Mobile Register reported. http://www.al.com/news/mobileregister/index.ssf?/base/news/1133864146195240.xml&coll=3 Where’s it coming from? Scott Hamilton has a theory — an as-yet-unreleased RAND study may have determined that a 767 tanker isn’t the best bet for the Air Force.
Key Quote: “‘The increasing press statements about the 777 are not just idle speculation,’ said Scott Hamilton, an aerospace analyst and president of the Seattle-based Leeham Co. ‘What does Boeing know that the rest of us don’t? I haven’t seen the report, but it’s possible that RAND concluded the (proposed Airbus KC-30) was a more capable airplane. That would explain the change in Boeing’s rhetoric.’”
I haven’t talked with Scott about this, but analyst Richard Aboulafia’s thinking is that Boeing would be better off if the Air Force wanted a 777 tanker, because the 777 is a far more-capable airplane than anything Airbus has to offer.
