I got about a dozen entries in our little 7E7 haiku contest. If you’re interested, you can check out all of them at my aerospace Weblog at heraldnet.com. Just go to the home page, click on the link to "Blogs" at the left and follow the signs.
Paul Ameden of Everett came up with two pretty good ones, which you can read online, and Myrtle Lorenzo of Everett gets extra credit for stringing together four haiku, all on the same theme:
"Phenomenal plane
Now get ready, Everett
Hoping for big bucks
Phenomenal plane
My, my, such hullabaloo
May we live through it
Phenomenal plane
Do not know much about it
Hope it proves worthy
What’s it all about?
Fancy plane for fancy ride
When are ticket sales?"
Tom Desmarais of Snohomish chipped in with one sure to tickle everyone who still has one of those "Refuse Toulouse" T-shirts somewhere:
"Planes buzz overhead
Scream ‘Boeing conquers Airbus’
Everett’s time is now"
But the winner is Sheila Lyon of Marysville, who seems to me to have captured the essence of what the new airplane program means to Snohomish County people who work at Boeing, and the rest of us who don’t:
"Launch the dream skyward,
Hope and heart its passengers
The Jet City lives."
On a more serious note, I’m writing the column this week from Fort Worth, Texas, where the heads of three U.S. airlines spoke late Monday night at the annual banquet for the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
The 7E7 may allow for the development of the first transoceanic low-fare airline, but don’t expect Southwest Airlines to be the one to pioneer that market.
"We’re not an international carrier, and we don’t have plans to be in the near future," Southwest chief executive Jim Parker said.
American Airlines is interested and is studying the plane, said Gerard Arpey, the CEO of that airline’s parent company, AMR. But it’ll be a while before it’s ready to start buying airplanes again.
After All Nippon Airways announced its plans last week to order 50 7E7s, executives with the Boeing Co. said they were in talks with low-fare carriers that are interested in operating the Dreamliner on longer routes. That echoed what analysts have been saying, that the 7E7 is the perfect airplane for an airline that doesn’t yet exist — a low-fare carrier that crisscrosses oceans much the same way that Southwest flies across the United States or RyanAir moves around Europe.
The 7E7’s technology does open up new opportunities, Parker said. But not for his airline, which is not interested in the plane.
AMR on the other hand, is interested. "We like it," Arpey said. "We’re studying it."
But on the other hand, American already has a lot of planes on order — 47 737s and nine 777s — that it will have to pay for and incorporate into its fleet, Arpey said. It pushed back delivery dates on a lot of those planes after Sept. 11, he noted. "That’s a lot of airplanes coming through 2010."
Continental Airlines CEO Gordon Bethune — who last week quipped that Continental is ready to order 7E7s today, but not ready to pay for them — said that Boeing has "probably got it right" when it comes to the debate between it and Airbus on the future of aviation.
Airbus believes there’s a need for bigger airplanes, such as the A380, to connect increasingly crowded hub airports, while Boeing projects that airlines will want smaller planes with increased range to bypass the big hubs by flying from secondary cities directly.
"That’s what customers think like, not engineers," Bethune said.
Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3459; corliss@heraldnet.com.
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