June 2012 Archives

Jim Albaugh, 62, will retire from Boeing on 1 October with a package of compensation, stock and benefits valued at $57.4 million in Boeing's 2011 proxy statement to shareholders.

The majority of Albaugh's retirement wealth comes from a $25.4 million account with voluntarily deferred compensation. Boeing's senior executive retirement plan also will pay Albaugh a monthly annuity, which has an estimated value of $10.1 million. As of 31 December, Albaugh also was awarded restricted stock units in three tranches worth a combined total of $8.1 million, although each tranche vests in one-year intervals with the unvested amount pro rated to Albaugh's retirement date.

Boeing replaced Albaugh as president and chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) on 26 June with former chief salesman Ray Conner, saying Albaugh had decided to retire after 1 October after accomplishing his primary goals in the first three years of his tenure. Albaugh will continue to serve as executive vice president of BCA until his retirement date.  

Account	Value ($M)
Career shares	1.84
Restricted stock units	8.51
Matching deferred stock units	1.81
Pension Value Plan	1.32
Supplemental executive retirement plan	10.1
Deferred compensation plan	25.4
Supplemental benefit plan	1.52
Special retention deferral	0.36
Service-based equity awards	4.94
Performance awards	1.55
Total	57.35

It was the worst-kept secret in aerospace. Qatar Airways chief executive Akbar Al Baker told reporters about it at EBACE six weeks ago, and someone we know (wink-wink) at the Wall Street Journal made a big splash with it earlier this week.

Finally, Boeing has confirmed what everybody now already knows (and, yet, we are still unable to resist a rare exclamation point): the 787 is joining the flying display at Farnborough!

Boeing test pilot Randy Neville won't even have to do his best Tex Johnson imitation. The 787 will certainly be the star of an otherwise subdued flying display during the four trade days. There's no F-22 or A400M debut for the Dreamliner to compete against, although we are looking forward to seeing the Korean T-50s, Russian Su-27s and -- assuming this time they don't get lost -- the B-52. [UPDATE: Airbus has just announced the A380 and A400M will also be in the flying display.]

This is probably a good time to remind everybody to register here to watch the entire flying display live. Flightglobal has again partnered with FLIR to stream live video from our media hub and air-to-air footage using FLIR's Pilatus PC-12 equipped with the Star Safire 380-HD sensor.

The reports that Airbus on Monday will open an A320 factory in Mobile, Alabama remain unconfirmed, but they are getting pretty close to official.

It's not just anonymous sources talking to the New York Times in Paris.

The Mobile Register has talked to employees at the Airbus engineering center, and they have been told rather intriguingly that they are not allowed to comment "because no official announcement has been made".

The Mobile newspaper also quotes local economic development official George Freeland saying in somewhat contradictory terms: "We've understood for some time that the Airbus announcement concerning its intention to build commercial liners in Mobile is imminent."

Knowing something is "imminent" for "some time" is a strange way to put things, but there could be valid reasons. Airbus has been in Alabama's sights for several years, but the intensity of the rhetoric picked up noticeably earlier this year. Alabama Governor Robert Bentley declared in February that he was in negotiations with Airbus in nearby New Orleans, and promised that they "were going to get some good results".

It's not clear if the French presidential election delayed Airbus' decision, or indeed if any decision had been made prior to the election. As of late April an Airbus official assured this blogger that there was still "no business case" for opening a fourth A320 final assembly line anywhere, adding to existing lines in Toulouse, Hamburg and Tianjin.

Perhaps, Airbus' sums have changed.

If Airbus moves to Mobile, it will be the clearest sign yet that the A320 output is growing to 60 aircraft per month by the end of the decade. As Flightglobal reported last year: "Industry analyst consensus, as well as prevailing wisdom inside Boeing, concludes the European airframer cannot achieve 60 A320s a month without major expansion of its Toulouse, Hamburg or Tianjin, China lines. This would open the door to a US-based final assembly line in Mobile, Alabama, current site of an Airbus engineering centre, late in the decade to meet the replacement demand in North America."

It would also mean a new era in commercial aircraft manufacturing in the US. Boeing has been the only company assembling large commercial aircraft on US soil since acquiring McDonnell Douglas in 1997, while Lockheed stopped building L-1011s in 1984.

It's too late for Airbus to use Mobile as political leverage in a bid to win a contract to deliver A330 tankers to the US Air Force. However, a commitment by Airbus to open a final assembly line and attract a regional aerospace cluster could make things a bit awkward for the US side of the dispute before the World Trade Organization. It would also move A320neo assembly closer to its US customers, which for the first time includes American Airlines.

President Obama congratulates Ray Conner in February after witnessing the contract signing for Lion Air's massive order for 201 737s. 

In an unexpected development, Ray Conner has become the new president and chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Jim Albaugh has already stepped down and will serve as executive vice president of BCA until he retires on 1 October.

Conner inherits a resurgent single-aisle product, a recovering 787 programme and some big decisions ahead over whether to pull the trigger on the 787-10 and, with product development vice president Nicole Piasecki and programme manager Scott Fancher, lay out the specifications of a new and improved 777 family.

If Conner, 57, manouevres these wickets successfully, it's not too early to wonder what else may be in store for the 35-year Boeing veteran. Boeing has a mandatory retirement age of 65, and the current chairman and chief executive, Jim McNerney, celebrates his 63rd birthday on -- at least according to Wikipedia -- 22 August.

But Conner's bid to become the corporate CEO runs against the tide of the history of the BCA division. Despite representing arguably the heart and soul of the Boeing brand, the BCA job is seldom a stepping stone on the path to become CEO. The 62-year-old Albaugh, for example, once was the subject of speculation he could succeed McNerney. Alan Mullaly was famously passed over for the job in 2004 after serving as the head of BCA for nearly six years.

Indeed, in the position's 40-year history, there have been nine BCA presidents, and only one moved on to become president of the whole company. That was Frank Schronz Shrontz in 1985. Of course, an executive vice president -- but not president -- of BCA, Phil Condit, claimed the corporate CEO title, but we cannot recommend that example.

Here's a full list of BCA presidents and the years they served:

Tex Boullioun - 1972-1981

Richard Welch (pdf) - 1981 -1984

Frank SchronzShrontz - 1984 - 1985

Dean Thornton - 1985 - 1993

Ron Woodard - 1994-1998

Alan Mullaly  -- 1998-2006

Scott Carson - 2006 - 2009

Jim Albaugh - 2009 - 2012

Ray Conner - 2012 -

Indonesia's safety authorities have published initial safety recommendations (see embedded document below) for what would seem like an extraordinarily unlikely event -- at least for the foreseeable future: another demonstration flight by a Superjet SSJ100 within the mountainous country's airspace.

After all, it's been less than two months since a Superjet carrying 45 passengers, including the Superjet's chief test pilot, crashed only meters below the lip of a vertical ridge of Mount Salak on a demonstration jolly out of Jakarta.

There remain many unanswered questions as the investigation continues, but so far nobody is pointing fingers at the SSJ100 itself. As our Singapore-based colleague Mavis Toh writes today, the initial safety recommendations published by Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee focus entirely on crew and administrative issues.

Meanwhile, Sukhoi chief executive Mikhail Pogosyan has told the Russian press that "the aircraft had no technical problems". United Aircraft Corporation's public relations department is being a bit more subtle: "For the time being, it is absolutely clear that there were no technical failures. However, the official preliminary results of the investigation have not been published yet. There are many details that should be linked. Therefore, it is somewhat premature at the moment to give forecasts about the final results."

Knkt 001 5 Vi Rek.ku 12 English

MONTREAL -- We sat down yesterday at Bombardier Aerospace headquarters with Mike Arcamone, who succeeded Gary Scott as president of the commercial aircraft division earlier this year. It's Arcamone's first job in the aerospace business after spending a career in the automotive manufacturing industry.

In the preparations for CSeries final assembly, Arcamone has implemented what some might consider an 'old-school' device: the wooden mock-up. On my tour of the Y hangar at Bombardier's Mirabel factory, this blogger saw a full-scale, highly detailed pine-and-plywood mock-up of the 110-to-130-seat CS100. There was even a wooden mock-up of an auxiliary power unit sitting on the floor -- possibly waiting to be installed in the nose cone. So don't call it the Spruce Goose, but maybe the Pine Mime?

We cannot immediately remember the last commercial aircraft programme to build a full-scale wooden mock-up for production purposes. Last year in Brazil, your blogger was allowed to walk inside a wooden fuselage mock-up of the Embraer KC-390. But that device was an operational simulator, created to allow the Brazilian air force a device for simulating cargo loads and paratroop jumps in a realistic structure.

For Bombardier, the wooden mock-up (aka, ahem, the Pine Mime) is part of a deliberate strategy to have a simulation back-up for almost everything to do with the CSeries. Bombardier has built a successful business with regional jets, turboprop airliners and business jets, but it's never attempted to build anything on the scale of the 110-145-seat CSeries family. The company is being exceedingly cautious. In the complete integrated aircraft systems test area (CIASTA), the Aircraft 0 is nearly fully-commissioned, and is perhaps best described as an Iron Bird on steroids. Bombardier hopes to receive certification credit for simulations performed on the ground on Aircraft 0, and perhaps reducing the 2,400h flight test programme to save time if the final assembly process is delayed.

First flight of the CSeries flight test vehicle (FTV-1) is scheduled in December, with entry into service following 12 months later. Arcamone told journalists and analysts yesterday to focus on whether Bombardier meets the latter milestone and not the former. Final assembly of FTV-1 is not scheduled to begin until September. Assembling the systems, wings and fuselage components together was supposed to take five months, but now Bombardier says it can be done in four.

Which brings us back to Arcamone's Pine Mime, the CS100 wooden mock-up inside Mirabel's Hangar Y.

Showing off the structure, Francois Minville, vice president of CSeries manufacturing, acknowledges the anachronistic nature of the wooden mock-up idea: "Is it the first time Bombardier has build a wooden aircraft? The answer is yes.Maybe in 1942 when we build aircraft for Canadair, but this is the first time. But the learning is incredible. We'd rather have that than have the surprise when we build the first aircraft. I am expecting to reduce the learning curve by half."

We asked Minville: "We've been to several manufacturers who've said that CATIA has allowed them to bypass this kind of thing, but you're saying it is still necessary to build a modern aircraft to go back and build a full-scale wooden mock-up?"

Minville replied: "I'll tell you that if you look carefully at what some of our competitors are doing I would guess that over the next few months and years you'll see something similar -- maybe not to that magnitude but something very similar. And, again, not to diminish the requirement or the added value that a tool like CATIA will bring you, but it's a different level. What we're looking at is non-value-added while you are building the aircraft. If you're within [a ten-thousandth of an inch tolerance level], for example, this is not going to show you. This is not for the 10 and 20-thousandth precision on parts. You're looking at your sequence of work. You're looking at your standard work, and how can you improve on health and safety. So it's different things." 

Pratt & Whitney today announced -- sort of -- a new delay for the Irkut MS-21 narrowbody programme.

Irkut has always said first flight of the 150-210-seat MS-21 would occur sometime in 2014. The timeframe was updated four months ago to "late-2014", as my colleague Ghim-Lay Yeo quoted Irkut president Alexey Federov at the Singapore air show.

P&W is the engine supplier for the MS-21. Irkut selected the PW1400G geared turbofan to power the MS-21 in April 2010.  Today, Irkut and P&W finalized the agreement to offer the PW1400G, seemingly just a formality.

P&W's press release today announcing the agreement could have easily been over-looked, except for this sentence buried in the second paragraph: " ... first flight of the PurePower PW1400G engined aircraft [is] planned for 2015 and entry into service in 2017".

We asked P&W about the 2015 timing for first flight. After checking with its internal programme office, P&W confirmed the new date is accurate. First flight is not scheduled until 2015 because first engine to test is not scheduled until 2014, P&W adds.

So now we know. MS-21 customers -- all seven of you with 206 combined orders-- please take note: First flight is now sometime in 2015, says P&W.

Japan Airlines has developed a virtual tour of its JA825J Boeing 787, offering 360-degree views of the widebody from several different vantage points around and in the aircraft - including the forward lav. Enjoy.

 

Our colleague Max Kingsley-Jones on Friday interviewed Elizabeth Lund, Boeing's 747-8 programme manager, on Lufthansa's inaugural 747-8 flight to Washington-Dulles.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, Lund was asked by journalists about the possibility of a "747-9" -- ergo, a new stretch of the 747-8, which itself is a 5.6m (18.4ft) stretch of the 747-400.

As Kingsley-Jones reported yesterday (for Pro subscribers only), Lund hinted such a project could follow the 777-8X/9X. Said Lund:

"The 747 could [be stretched], some day. Once in a while on the drawing board we toy with a few things, but it is not imminent. Boeing's product development priorities are to finish the 787-9, look at a 787-10X, the 737 Max and what to do with the 777. So the 747 [has to wait its] turn on the product development board - we need to wrap up and fly for a little while, while the other models are developed."

The history of the 747-8's development is intriguing, as Kingsley-Jones also notes.

Flight International reported in July 1995 (download pdf page) the first details of new 747 stretch concepts dubbed the 747-500X and 747-600X. The former was described nearly 17 years ago as a 6m stretch of the 747-400, or only about a foot longer than what became the 747-8. The 747-600X, on the other hand, was a much larger beast, with a 79m wingspan and seating more than 600 in a three-class configuration and more than 800 in a high-density lay-out. The 747-600X, of course, never advanced beyond the concept stage, despite great anticipation of a possible launch at the 1996 Farnborough Air Show.

Who knows? After another decade -- perhaps after the demise of Airbus A380 production -- there will be room for yet another stretch of the venerable 747.

[Updated at 3:26pm with 747-600X photo and credit.]