Slashdot Mirror
Boeing Sonic Cruiser Project Shelved
jonerik writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is reporting that Boeing is set to announce the cancellation of its Sonic Cruiser project tomorrow; not because the technology wasn't mature enough, but because the company was unable to make the case for an airliner that would fly at just under the speed of sound in the airline industry's post-9/11 business environment. Too bad, too. It was a very cool-looking plane. Instead, the company will focus on a new ultra-efficient airliner - codenamed 'Yellowstone' - that will look very much like its existing 767 and 777 models. The new aircraft is expected to be ready to enter service in 2008, two years after Airbus' mammoth 555-seat A380 is expected to be ready for service."
With major airlines folding, profit margins slim, a bear market because of any number of reasons, and a new highly expensive plane. I mena you do the math... what major airline is gonna want to dump a bunch of money into basically untested hardware that doesn't have a safety record while attempting to pay out stock dividends. If I were in charge of a major airline I wouldnt consider picking this up for now either. Now if the airline industry gets a major rebound then is the time, just not right now in this shitty economy.
The problem is that history does not bear it out. Successful companies are built when risk-takers (i) come up with good ideas (ii) implement those ideas they way they think is right, regardless of what the spreadsheets say. See the history of General Electric, du Pont, DEC, Microsoft, etc.
Typically those companies start to die when the bean counters arrive and formalize everything with "rate of return" studies. See DEC for the the most extreme example of such a process, and consider that there could never have been a "rate of return" study for Ford Motor Company, since the market Henry Ford wanted to serve did not exist before his company created it.
sPh
It looks like the strategy is to leave the leading edge to others and concentrate on doing what can be done now cheaper. Which is not a totally stupid idea. It's all very well to have the fastest/biggest/coolest looking aircraft, but business is interested in the bottom line. When you fly, do you choose the coolest aircraft or the cheapest ticket?
What thay are saying is that the jet airliner industry is now "mature". Until the next major technological innovation, aircraft will continue to look and perform as they do now. So capitalise on the large-scale market and leave the edges to someone else. Be Ford, not Ferrari.
What surprises me is replacing the 767 rather than the much older 737. The technology must be dated despite the many facelifts, and there must be a lot of planes up for replacement. Are thay abandoning that market to Airbusses 319/320/321?
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
This seems a bit odd in light of recent moves away from hub/spoke routes toward regional routes. Some pundits have been citing over-reliance on hub/spoke to be part of the major airlines' financial problems. I live off the main track, and flying anywhere used to involve getting to a hub, first. For the past several years, flying anywhere has involved taking a regional jet, either directly to my destination, or to transfer at a non-major-hub airport.
Most of my recent flights have been on a 50-seat jet build in South America. Prior to that, I remember going to/from major hubs on much bigger planes, largely empty. It makes me wonder about the real economy of coming up with an airplane family that starts at 555 seats. IMHO, "eating low" in the airline chain is the way to go.
The new Boeing plane looked interesting in this respect, though I suspect pursuit of greater operating economy is more important than the speed. As someone else mentioned, delays at airports are more important than airspeed to the total travel time.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I don't think going just under the speed of sound is going to cut your travel time in half, although it will reduce it pretty significantly. How much good does that really do, though, when you spend two hours going through security?
I'd rather see more efficient planes than faster planes; given enough fuel savings, the cost of flight might actually come down a bit.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
And, of course, the Sonic Cruiser would have no effect whatever on the time that the typical aircraft spends waiting in line on the ground for a takeoff slot....
it would only cut one hour off the flight time from LA - NYC.
Can you imagine what is does with the flight from La to Amsterdam, London, Paris or Berlin...
Stop being so US centric please. There is a whole world outside the US of A besides Afghanistan and Iraq.
So what exactly IS Boeing's business strategy for commercial airliners? Do they plan to just give up competing with Airbus
Well, they're not really quitting competing with Airbus. In fact, what they're doing could be described as increasing competition with Airbus, rather than pursuing wacky pie-in-the-sky designs that no airline can afford. Airbus might want to do the same vis-a-vis its A380. I think the A380 is a cool plane (double decked!), but I just don't see the increased demand for long-range air transport the airlines would need to support purchasing such a HUGE plane.
Or do they have some secret plan (a blended-wing-body design perhaps) dramatic enough to break them out of their current rut, and are just waiting for the right time to announce it? Cause the way Boeing is going they won't be a factor in commercial sales in 5-7 years.
There's a time for revolutionary designs, and a time for sitting back and polishing the ones you've already got. These are pretty lean times for the airlines, so it's likewise a lean time for aircraft manufacturers. The only time airlines upgrade their fleets is when they have money to burn. Aircraft aren't like computers. An airline can keep an aircraft for 20-30 years, so they can afford to wait. Besides, I don't think Boeing is dumping their R&D department on the street; they're just cancelling a project whose time has not yet come.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
More proof, if it were needed, that "good enough" technology always triumphs over the best.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
They did. The first plane at least was going as fast as the proposed Sonic Cruiser speed, and was pretty close to Mach 1, when it hit. A little sharper turn and it would have broken up in flight... If you read the accident report on the Egypt Air 767 crash you will find that Boeing estimated that the aircraft was well over Mach 1 during the dive, but that it was still recoverable at that point.
I routinely fly in both jets and turboprop aircraft, and you wouldn't want a turboprop for a long flight. They're too damn noisy.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Airbus and Boeing see the airline market evolving in different directions. Airbus says forecasts show airlines will be expanding the hub and spoke networks as they have been ever since the 747 introduced the idea of a huge airliner. Being sees more trend for direct flights, such as the cheap and profitable Southwest (USA) and Ryanair (Europe).
Hub and spoke requires big airliners to crowd ever more people into airports at the same time so they can make connections. Passengers like the connectivity but can't stand the cattle car planes and mammoth terminals and transfer problems; when airlines don't keep to their schedule, people miss connections.
Direct flights require more airplanes but smaller ones. People like the direct flights and smaller airplanes, but you can't get the same coverage as with hub and spoke. Direct flights skim the cream, sort of, and have been one of the reasons for the growth of regional airlines with small turboprop planes, which fill in the connectivity.
As for which will win out, my personal guess is that hub and spoke is reaching its limits, and bigger planes will be needed to keep them going. But these will only replacements for the current big planes, not new growth, because you can only get so many planes into one airport at the same time. True growth will be in direct connections, because these don't have to be prime time flights.
Also, business travel is the one that requires flights all around the clock, and especially the prime time flights, whereas tourists are more willing to take off peak flights and save money. Business travel is probably going to shrink as video conferencing, email, etc, takes the sting out of needing face to face meetings. Whereas tourism will only grow. I see this as favoring direct flights.
I believe, personally with not much facts, and not being in the industry, that Boeing has the right long term outlook, but things will change so slowly that the Airbus 380 will still sell well enough to pay for itself. It just won't have the impact of the 747. Airbus is following the old trend to its conclsuion, Boeing is going with the long term growth.
Infuriate left and right
The airline business is going to pick up.
But it's not going to pick up with a bunch of big ass planes like we got in the 70s and 80s.
The trend is towards smaller planes.
737, 757, Bombardier CRJ, Brazilias, 717, etc.
http://www.bombardier.com/en/3_0/3_1/3_1_1.html
I'm going to give a "US-centric" example, cause thats where I live.
You have a small city - Rapid City. With a USAF base - 85,000 people, with around 130,000 that use that airport as thier "hub". In the past to get anywhere for connecting flights you got to go to one of the three regional hubs - Denver, Salt Lake City to go West and South or the Twin Cities to go East and South. That's great, but when weather slams SLC, it's usually slamming Denver too.
Now it's changing. Now that there are cheaper, longer range faster small jets like the CRJ-700 the airlines are putting in point to point routes from Rapid City. Rapid to Las Vegas, Rapid to Pheonix are the first two coming in.
Or places like Medford OR, where to connect to had to shuttle to Sacramento or Portland, now has direct conections to Pheonix, Las Vegas, LA in regional jets.
UK is building more airports, just don't expect to see 777s, 747s and A-340s and 380s at them all.
No, Southwest shows that Americans like freedom of choice. When I fly Southwest, if I don't want to sit next to some sweaty 400-pounder who hasn't bathed in a month, I don't have to. If some woman with a litter of bratty, ill-mannered, obviously undisciplined "because-we-don't-believe-in-striking-children" screaming brats sits down next to me, I can (and do) move.
Friend, if it's so horrible, fly somebody else! There are lots of airlines out there that offer assigned seating.
Hmmm, lets see SouthWest, Blue, Rynair, Easy Jet profitable. Everybody else sick! SouthWest, Blue, Rynair, Easy Jet REALLY CHEAP tickets = profitable...
No I think the reason why the other airlines are on the edge is because they mismanaged their companies. They focused on the wrong things and result they are totally unprofitable....
9/11 may have taken some hits, but not as much as the airlines are whining about...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
"The basic business model hasn't changed at all in the past 40 years."
Actually the business model changed significantly after airline deregulation. Many slashdotters are probably too young to remember that air travel was once primarily for the wealthy or business travellers. Cheap airlines with no-frills service like Southwest really started making money after deregulation allowed them to adopt a "cattle car" mentality. The major airlines had to adopt some of the same measures and slash prices to compete. Complain about only getting a bag of peanuts and not having enough legroom if you want (or you could always shell out the money for 1st class you cheap b@$#@&%), but now even college students can afford to fly home for Christmas! And the airlines discovered that they could make a whole boatload of money by going with lower cost but much higher volume. This was a major change to the basic business model. It required significant investment in new aircraft, but the profits made that investment worthwhile... Unfortunately the airlines didn't spread enough of that profit around the beltway; congress raised fuel taxes on the now richer airlines*. Airlines that had counted on using those riches to pay off the airplanes they had just financed where hit hard, and some (like Pan Am) were killed by it. Yet, amazingly the same congressmen that hiked the fuel taxes on the airlines blamed "deregulation" for Pan Am's demise; everyone knows, after all, that congress can run airtravel better than private companies... just look at what a great job they do with space travel and passenger trains. It would be really nice if congress spent some of that increased fuel tax money on building more airports or NASA aeronautical research, but I'm not holding my breath. Aeronautical research at NASA seems to get hind tit to things like the ISS.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there hasn't been a change in business model in 10-20 years. The cheap, readily available but somewhat crowded airtravel of today was not around in 1962.
* That is the problem with changes in gov't policy when the gov't is so large. You can have the best business plan in the world but you can never be sure that an unforseeable change in tax structure or regulation won't destroy your plans completely. It is like sleeping with a hippo. It can be warm and cozy for right now, but you never now when your bedmate might roll over and crush you.
With the extension of ETOPS ratings from 90 minutes to 180+ minutes, airlines can now use smaller twin engine airplanes on those routes where 3 or 4 engine airplanes could only be used before the ETOPS extensions. Also, with the ETOPS extension, more direct routes can now be flown (cheaper since less fuel is used)
The 767 is the mid-size work horse (the mini-van of the business) of the Boeing fleet. This model is used on trans-Atlantic, coast-to-coast and many pacific routes. It has the right mix of attributes to make it profitable for many airlines on many routes.
The future markets are in the 100 seat and 200-300 seat medium/long range categories. In those areas, Boeing is well positioned with the 767 and the 717.
The 717 (aka MD-95) is great airplane and customers and passengers love it. What is really needed to make this plane 'take off' is a solid marketing strategy
They are right.
All of the traditional air carriers are in trouble and the entire industry to due for a shakeout. Southwest, JetBlue, and RyanAir are setting the new standard in cheap, efficient travel.
Making a gargantuan aircraft introduces more liabilities than benefits. Insurance rates will be higher, airport terminals will be stressed too much and the cost will be too high to support any kind of volume.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Boeing is basing their strategy on the idea that travel in big planes to big hubs is going to decline relative to travel in smaller planes flying more direct routes to smaller cities.
Airbus is betting that the airlines will continue to move large numbers of people between a relatively small number of giant hubs.
That's it in a nutshell.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Great idea... let's also put sweatshop factories aboard the planes so that passengers may work off the $10,000 airfare.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Innovative, exciting projects should never be cancelled.
Boeing used to make the inspiring projects that kids got excited about. And it worked as a business model. There isn't a plane that Boeing did that was risky and innovative that didn't pay off. The 707, 727, 737 and 747 were all radical for their day. And these innovations built Boeing and excited a generation of kids in the 1960s. And these risky designs were hugely successful against a huge number of competitors.
From 1970 on, though, Boeing became risk-averse and has built nothing but 707 look-alikes that have been marginally successful even when they only had one competitor in Airbus.
It's also worth noting that the lack of innovation happened first and the lack of competitors later. It wasn't a lack of competition that killed innovation. It was a lack of innovation that allowed the bean counters to drive each other out of a generic business.
Nope. That's the number one rule of failing businesses. No great business was built by refusing to innovate but a lot of businesses have disappeared by "Don't fix what isn't broken" thinking.
Feel free to show a business that's succeeded by catering to the beancounters while refusing to innovate for the end-user. Really. Good luck in finding one.