British Airways boss hints at Boeing buy

Getting caught up on my reading … I thought this story from The Guardian in Manchester was an interesting discussion of what will go into British Airways’ decision to order new jets.

The big news here for Boeing in Everett — BA isn’t big on Airbus’ long-haul offerings.

Key Quote: “Martin Broughton, BA’s chairman, seemed to pour cold water on Airbus’s two star offerings, its A380 superjumbo and A350 hyper-efficient long range, mid-capacity ‘point to pointer’. Of the A380, he said ‘the jury is still out’ and he believed the A350 was unlikely to be a principal long-haul aircraft at the airline.”

BA’s testing the waters at this point. Its current fleet is relatively young and it probably won’t need to replace its older 747s and 767s until about 2009 or 2010. That’s just about the time Boeing’s 747 Advanced would come on the market. And sonuvagun, BA is widely rumored to be one of the potential 747 Advanced launch customers.

Here’s the link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/airlines/story/0,1371,1534979,00.html

And speaking of the 747 Advanced, Leeham Co.’s Scott Hamilton looks at that and at Boeing’s recent launch of the 737-900ER in this essay:

http://www.leeham.net/filelib/Scottscolumn072605.pdf