7E7 may decide Boeing's future here

Boeing will soon publicly lay out a wish list for Washington state to stay in the running to build its new 7E7 jet. Much more could be at stake than a single airplane program.

It's not just one jet but potentially the entire next-generation Boeing fleet that's up for grabs, according to people inside the company.

A long-term Boeing plan for commercial-airplane manufacture, developed within a program called 20XX, envisions the 7E7 as the first in a projected fleet of jets that would have a great deal in common in design, operations, systems and manufacturing.

Boeing officials stress the 20XX plan is just one of several possible visions for the future of Boeing's commercial-airplane business. But a sketch of the plan was recently presented internally, and industry analysts see a simplified common fleet as a natural direction.

The prospect of a common fleet underscores the importance of landing the 7E7 assembly line: Whoever wins that bidding war would be positioned to build all of Boeing's future models.

"If we pull this off, we'll ruin Airbus. We'll reinvent the whole business," said one senior technical employee. "But if Boeing doesn't build the 7E7 in Washington, they'll never build another plane here."

The idea is a new jet fleet spanning the entire airliner market with just three platform sizes, compared with the current roster of six distinct Boeing models.

The plan would essentially turn the next generation of multimillion-dollar Boeing airplanes into commodities.

They'd have slightly better performance than today's jets. But they'd be significantly cheaper for airlines to buy, maintain and operate because of a common streamlined, heavily-outsourced manufacturing process, common airplane systems and common cockpits.

Commonality of the fleet would be such that different-size platforms might even be built on the same assembly line, insiders say.

Tom Downey, Boeing Commercial Airplanes vice president of communications, said simplified jet fleets with much commonality is where airlines are going long term. But he said the 20XX plan represents very long-term thinking and warned that conclusions about the 7E7's relation to future products were "premature."

"There's no timetable for any airplane beyond the 7E7," Downey said. "What we're doing right now is about this airplane and this market opportunity."

The 20XX plan for a new common fleet was an offshoot of a late-'90s project called the Aircraft Creation Process Strategy — headed by Walt Gillette, now chief engineer on the 7E7 team.

The project aimed to slash the huge upfront investment bets and long development time of jet manufacture. One out-of-the-ballpark goal was the "One in Ten airplane": a plane that could be built for $1 billion and produced in 10 months from design to first flight.

By contrast, Boeing's last new jet, the 777, rolled out in 1994, took five years to develop. Boeing has not said how much it cost, but published estimates have exceeded $10 billion.

Gillette's group produced the outline of a plan that would dramatically cut Boeing's costs and development time by having global partners pay for much of the design and development and have them do a great deal more detail work prior to final assembly.

The idea is to draw together Boeing and its global suppliers into a tight operational partnership akin to the Airbus consortium.

Later, a team of engineers within Phantom Works, Boeing's research and development unit, extended the idea five decades into the future, applying design and manufacture improvements to an entire common fleet.

Other more radical futures were developed simultaneously within Phantom Works — including the Sonic Cruiser, the high-speed jet Boeing shelved last year, and the blended wing-body flying wing design. Compared with these breakthrough aerodynamic designs, the idea of a super-cheap common fleet seemed humdrum. Yet it, too, was revolutionary, not for aerodynamics but for the approach to cost-saving in design, manufacturing and operations.

The processes set in place for the 7E7 could dramatically speed development of future platforms. If it works the way the 20XX plan envisions it, the 7E7 could be followed rapidly by other models.

The obvious first choice in the new line of platforms would be a middle-market jet like the 7E7.

The 777 large jet and the 737 single-aisle jet, at opposite ends of the airliner market, are currently Boeing's only successful airplane programs and could potentially continue for 20 years and more.

Current customers for those planes will effectively decide when new models in these size categories should enter the market.

The 20XX plan has not been publicly disclosed, but Boeing executives have hinted at moving in that direction.

"We envision a future with fewer platforms, more commonality," said Hank Queen, a vice president on the leadership team at Boeing Commercial Airlines, in the October 2002 issue of Boeing's in-house magazine Frontiers.

In November, commercial-airlines Chief Executive Alan Mulally said Boeing eventually could end up with only three or four airplane models.

A more detailed internal glimpse came in a November 2002 speech by Thomas Burns, then a vice president in the Information Services unit of Boeing Commercial Airlines.

In a talk to 2,000 employees at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Burns outlined "a sea-change in aviation history" and a bright future for a company demoralized by massive layoffs.

He talked about a "family" of airplanes and new, more flexible manufacturing systems.

According to employees who attended the meeting, a screen behind Burns displayed a slide showing a "new business model." Boeing's six current jets were lined in a column down the left-hand side. The right-hand side depicted the future: three platforms, with silhouettes of a large jet, a medium jet and a small jet. The silhouettes were identical except for scale and depicted a conventional-looking jet.

Downey described Burns' presentation as "notional, but a possibility."

The prospect of a future family of planes makes location of the 7E7 final assembly site a momentous decision.

It's true the sketchily-known outline of the manufacturing plan would promise many fewer final-assembly jobs than with previous Boeing planes. On the other hand, major suppliers, doing more of the work themselves, would have to establish facilities close to the plant, adding jobs.

Extensive use of advanced materials would mean fewer, larger parts. Large subassemblies would be shipped in and snapped together. Fuselages would arrive for final assembly already "stuffed": pre-loaded with everything from seats to overhead bins to wiring.

To ensure seamless integration, worldwide partners would be linked via the Internet to secure Boeing engineering and manufacturing databases.

Flexible, universal tooling would allow manufacture of different size planes on a single moving line. And the line would hum. According to someone familiar with the plans, final assembly would be measured in days.

Industry experts, polled on the merits of the 7E7 as a precursor to a common fleet, judged the strategy plausible, even natural.

"If they don't think like this, I'd be very surprised and disappointed," said Adam Pilarski, a senior vice president with aviation consultants Avitas.

But Pilarski and others warned of alternative possibilities: the conventional tube-and-wing design could be blown away by some future technology.

"Let me play Devil's Advocate," said Jerry Ennis, an industry consultant and former vice president of prototyping and manufacturing technology in Boeing's Phantom Works. "Is the 7E7 the last of the tube-and-wing aircraft?"

Ennis sees the 7E7, a conventional aerodynamic design, as competing on cost alone: It must be cheaper to buy and cheaper to run. But the jets will have limited performance advantages.

"We're talking about just another airplane, not about changing the market," said Ennis. "The hazard of that approach is that somebody may change the rules. I don't think it's a tube-and-wing in 2020."

The aerodynamically radical Sonic Cruiser and blended wing-body configurations remain on Boeing's drawing board. If the technology advances and market conditions are right, Ennis suggests, either could produce a future very different from a 7E7-shaped fleet.

One company insider fears that Washington residents don't appreciate the full extent of what they could lose if they lose the 7E7.

With all of Airbus' resources tied up in the risky bet of the superjumbo A380, he said, a cost-effective, 7E7-style common fleet could recapture Boeing's dominance of the airliner market.

"We can kick Airbus' butt from here," he said, "It offends my sense of citizenship to up and pull that out of Puget Sound. Why leave a ghost town?"