SEATTLE – The Boeing Co. remains confident that it will hit its target of selling 200 7E7s by the end of the year, the company’s top Dreamliner salesman said Thursday.
And if they don’t, so what? a German aircraft financier added.
“We look at the long-term prospects,” said Bert van Leeuwen, a senior vice president with Deutsche Verkehrs Bank. “We feel the 7E7 is a very viable program. We’re not getting awfully worried if there’s a delay of half a year.”
Van Leeuwen was part of a panel that discussed Boeing’s progress on the 7E7 following a two-day meeting of airline customers and their bankers in Seattle this week.
Boeing engineers in Everett and their partners have finished work on most of the major design issues and have moved on to the details, said John Feren, Boeing’s vice president of sales and marketing for the 7E7.
“We’ll sit down and have a caucus about the benefits of saving 2 pounds,” he said. “It’s more about the producibility of the airplane, the maintainability.”
The company is on track to release the detailed designs to suppliers in July, he said. At that point, they’ll begin making the parts for the first 7E7s.
The question is, how many 7E7s will that be?
Boeing so far has firm orders for 52 7E7s, and Blue Panorama chief executive Franco Pecci said Thursday that his Italian airline will sign a contract for four planes within days.
British charter carrier First Choice Holidays also has announced that it wants six 7E7s, and Vietnam Airlines officials have said they want four – although Boeing hasn’t confirmed that order.
That’s far short of the 200 first-year orders Boeing executives projected when they launched the program last winter. However, Feren said airlines have put down deposits on more than 200 Dreamliners.
“The initial customer response has wildly exceeded expectations,” he said. “It is material for people to be aware of that.”
Those deposits haven’t turned into firm orders for a number of reasons, in part because Boeing hasn’t been pushing airlines to sign. Because the orders haven’t come as fast as projected, critics have begun doubting the program, Feren said. “Our candor may have worked against us.”
But van Leeuwen said it doesn’t matter if Boeing hits the 200-order mark by the end of the year.
“The 31st of December is just a date,” he said. “It’s not something that’s essential to the success of the aircraft.”
Airbus’ talk of launching a quick-and-dirty new jet, the A350, to compete with the Dreamliner has not been a factor, Feren said.
“We haven’t had anyone call us up and say, ‘We don’t want to talk to you for two months while we find out about the A350,” he said.
Airbus has said it could rush the plane – a revamped A330 with 7E7 engines – to the market in 2008, about the time the 7E7 is ready, and could do it more cheaply.
But so far Airbus hasn’t presented airlines or bankers with any details about the concept, van Leeuwen said.
If Airbus does do something on the cheap, well, “you get what you pay for,” van Leeuwen said. “It’s unlikely you can achieve something similar to the 7E7.”
Whether Airbus could poach 7E7 sales with a cheaper product is “a great what-if question,” Feren said. “It’s isn’t one that’s keeping us up nights.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
