Are you my MOM?

Richard Aboulafia, vice president, analysis at Teal Group is a strident critic, saying simply: “It’s all about what they [Boeing] should do and what they are doing. And what they should do is launch the MOM aircraft as quickly as possible and build a world beater like they did with the 777. It’s tough to be optimistic about their willingness to build a new product no matter how promising. ” There is no doubt the 787 problems have impacted Boeing’s thinking, but Aboulafia now worries that the company is “gun shy” and afraid to move decisively. “Unquestionably the 787 [fiasco] has an impact on their decision-making going forward. Boeing is too focused on shareholder returns. Boeing needs to say enough. It’s time to invest in the future,” he says.

Aboulafia references history to draw some parallels. “Interestingly in the bio on the Boeing website for Harry Stonecipher, former McDonnell Douglas President and CEO and later Boeing chairman, it lauds him saying ‘McDonnell Douglas’ financial performance soared under Stonecipher, with the stock increasing from $18. 48 just prior to his arrival to more than $70 just before the company merged with Boeing in August 1997. ’ ” But, says Aboulafia, the problem was in 1997 when McDonnell Douglas had nothing…absolutely nothing new on the horizon.

“It lost the ATF competition and cancelled its MDXX commercial program saying it would require billions to fix the lack of R&D over the previous 20 years. Is this where Boeing is headed?” Certainly there were very mixed messages coming out of Farnborough with some senior Boeing executives talking up the need for the MOM while its chairman, president and CEO Dennis Muilenburg told Australian Aviation that the company would stick to its timeline of 2024/25 for the MOM entry into service.

When asked if the US big three – United, American and Delta – which are making record profits came to Boeing and said we want the MOM sooner than later and would buy a hundred each if Boeing brought the program forward, the answer was that the company would stick to its timeline.

Of course, an orderly production plan is essential, agrees Aboulafia, but he says the 787’s lessons have been learned and learned well.

Boeing has fixed all those design and production issues, argues Aboulafia, and there is a very different management and board team in place.

And the hard yards have been done on the 737 MAX and 787-10 and the 777X is well advanced, so engineering talent should not be a major issue.

Aboulafia warns Boeing that Airbus has the engineering talent in abundance after the successful execution of the A350 XWB program. “And they have the cash to press forward with an all-new MOM aircraft. This is a clear and present danger for Boeing,” he adds.

With its A321ceo, A321neo and A330neo Airbus now dominates the 220 to 330 seat medium-haul market, whereas the 787-8 is more a longer-ranged machine.

Saj Ahmad, chief analyst at StrategicAero Research, tends to agree with Aboulafia and says “as long as Boeing dithers on decision-making, losing the market to the A321neo is not the least of their problems – the bigger problem is not providing airlines with a solution or an alternative. ” And what should that alternative be? “That is a challenge,” says Ahmad. “The gap in the market that Boeing has identified is certainly one which can and should be addressed. ” “The LCCs of the world have pressures to turn around their 737s or A320s in as little as 15-20 minutes – after all, these operations only make money when their plane is airborne, not while it’s at the gate. So once you get into the 230+ passenger category, you’d really have to pull out all the stops to get passengers off, baggage unloaded, refuelled and filled up with catering pretty darn fast,” he points out.

“To that end, it seems to me that the MOM proposition will end up being a twin-aisle creature sporting a low density cabin of 2-3-2 or a compressed LCC single-class layout of 2-4-2. ” Aboulafia agrees with that view. “There are potentially two markets though – single-aisle and twin-aisle [260-270 seats]. It is a great opportunity but also a great challenge,” says Aboulafia.

“Single-aisle is a commodity game whereas the twin-aisle is all about pricing power of what it is worth [to the consumer]. ” Aboulafia warns that the “problem for a twin-aisle is the brutal margins for manufacturing. But Boeing should build a twin-aisle for that is where the growth is. And it should be 2-2-2 but wide enough for 2-3-2 but slightly narrower than a 767,” concludes Aboulafia.

Ahmed suggests that Boeing “will want to use its proprietary monolithic single piece composite fuselage design as per the 787 for the MOM. ” Another cheaper and faster option, says Ahmed, is to revamp the 737 MAX 9’s centre fuselage and wing box and give it a 777X-style new composite wing, higher ground clearance and add on the current LEAP-1A engine. “And there you have it – a credible machine, but one that again is a 757-style single-aisle jet. ” One of the issues is that any MOM entrant may impact on the top end of the 737 MAX market.

“The 737 MAX is seen as a 15- year program and any new MOM will certainly kill off interest in the 737 MAX 9 or the possible stretched 737 MAX 10. ” “That is the problem,” says Ahmed. “Boeing is too stuck as to whether the answer to MOM lies in an all-new twin-aisle machine or whether the 737 MAX has the basis for one final major iteration to take on the A321neo. ” Away from the strategic question of what Boeing will do, Mike Delaney, vice president and general manager of airplane development at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, gives some detail of what the MOM will be.

In an interview with Aviation Week’s Guy Norris prior to Farnborough, he said that Boeing had received input from 36 airlines and found consensus that the need was for an aircraft between 200 and 270 seats with a range of up to 5,000nm.

According to Norris, Delaney said that the “aircraft will have a sixth-generation composite wing, more electrical systems and advanced, high-bypass ratio engines. It also may feature an unusual elliptical fuselage cross-section, optimised to provide twin-aisle capacity with single-aisle economics. ” “The MOM is starting to shape out to be in an area from where the 757 used to fly to where the 767-200/300 flies,” Delaney told Norris.

But that is not right across the board with the airlines’ requirements.

“You have three groups: those that want to fly more people, those that want more range and the group that wants to fly more people with more range. However, this airplane really wants to be transatlantic, so most of the customers want [it] to fly 4,800-5,000nm. That’s significantly longer than the 757, but the seat count wants to be between 200 and 260 to 270 max. So it is a little bit bigger than a current single-aisle but not quite as big as a 767-type aircraft,” Delaney said.

Clearly such an aircraft opens up a range of new route possibilities, Delany told media at Farnborough.

“Airline planners are thinking about their route structure and realising that they are going to have to completely rethink their route structures for the MOM,” Delany told media.

But here is the problem, says Norris.

“This may look promising on a presentation. The stark reality depends on Boeing’s ability to produce the aircraft at a sufficiently low cost to meet the price sensitivity of the market,” Norris said.

The issue, explains Norris, is that the aircraft straddles the “gap between today’s single-aisle and twin-aisle markets, thus airlines expect to pay narrowbody prices for widebody performance. ” But as Australian Aviation revealed last year, the gap may not be that big and certainly not a deal breaker.

Back in 1980 that certainly was not a big issue, according to Boeing legacy company McDonnell Douglas (MDC).

In its brochure ‘A First Class Experience – At Economy Fare’ extolling the virtues of its twin-aisle Advanced Twin Medium Range (ATMR) 757 competitor, it stated that it only required one passenger per trip to offset the weight and drag of the additional aisle.

MDC also claimed that the 178- seat mixed class ATMR would have a fuel burn 24 per cent lower than the 757.

According to the presentation, the ATMR, later dubbed the DC-11, would have 14 first class seats at a 38-inch pitch in a 2-1-2 configuration and have 168 economy seats at 34 inch pitch in a 2-2-2 pitch.

With the push by passengers to bring all their luggage into the cabin, the boarding of single aisle aircraft has become a major headache with airlines forced to allow up to 30 minutes for the boarding process in the US and Canada, which means a turnaround of at least an hour.

And that trend is spreading.

Those times wipe out the low-cost airline model’s 30 minute turnaround.

The McDonnell Douglas DC-11 cross-section was just 55cm wider than a 757 and 49cm narrower than the 767.

These cabin dimensions allowed for 17. 7in (45cm)-wide seats and an 18in (46cm) aisle.

With the world moving on since 1980 any new twin-aisle design would certainly be wider again to permit a 18. 5in (47cm)-wide seat and an 18in aisle. And for those airlines which insist on cramming as many passengers as possible into their aircraft there is also the option of taking out one aisle and introducing a 4-3 configuration.

Interestingly MDC also looked at a slightly different double bubble cross-section to enable the DC-11 to take LD3 containers, increasing its revenue-generation potential. The overall drag penalty was put at three per cent.

Boeing also toyed with the twin-aisle concept with its 7J7 and a full cabin mockup was shown at the 1987 Paris Airshow.

It took the twin-aisle concept further with a 4. 8m cabin width that would permit 2-3-2 seating, 17in (43cm)-wide seats and 18in (46cm) aisles in economy.

It would be powered by rear mounted unducted fans, but later Boeing looked at a wing-mounted International Aero Engines Super Fan configuration and engine that was originally to be fitted to the A340 but was dropped due to technology issues.

Boeing assembled an international team to build the 7J7 including the Japanese heavies Short Brothers, SAAB Scania and Australia’s Hawker de Havilland.

Head of the 7J7 program was Alan Mulally, who would later rise to be president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and later president of Ford Motor Company.

Like MDC, Boeing polled over 2,500 frequent flyers after they toured the 7J7 mockup and the layout received an overwhelming thumbs up.

The twin-aisle surfaced again as one of two patents filed by Boeing under the heading “Twin-Aisle Small Airplane”, with Mithra Sankrithi, a manager in Commercial Airplanes’ product development, configuration and engineering analysis group, named as the inventor.

The patents were submitted on October 2 2001 and approved in 2003 and 2004. One cabin sports a 2-3-2 configuration and more width than height. In the patent applications, Sankrithi claims the new configuration could deliver “the comfort typically reserved for larger aircraft” while at the same time minimizing drag, weight penalties, fuel burn and “economic penalties. ” But while all the rhetoric and logic points to a twin-aisle solution Delaney was coy on a direct question from Australian Aviation as to what preference the airlines had for the MOM – single or twin-aisle.

“There is a preference but I am not going to tell you,” said Delaney.

And Delaney dismisses concerns that Boeing is nervous about a new program, at least from an engineering perspective.

“The beauty of it is, because of the airplane technologies we developed for the MAX, 787 and 777X, we have all the things we need to put the airplane together,” he told Norris.

But the trick is “can we get it to a price point that is right for our customers?” “There are things we are watching, like the ability of this production system to scale. That’s because the rates here and the rates for the next airplane, which would be a replacement for the 737 potentially, require us to build at rate and at scale, so there are a whole bunch of lessons or objectives. ” One of the reasons that Boeing is in no hurry is that it wants to learn from 777X production to reduce manufacturing costs.

“We expect ourselves to get better and more efficient as we understand the engineering process, the material set, the way to make it, the way to handle defects and all the other aspects of manufacturing,” he told Norris.

Understanding the needs of all the potential customers is also a challenge.

At Farnborough, Randy Tinseth, VP marketing at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, told media that not only is it the economics of building the MOM but also the “breadth and depth of the customer base” of up to 300 operators.

He notes that not only are there differences in passenger count and range but business models as well.

“One of the challenges is to figure out how you can build an airplane that has the flexibility to address the concerns of all of those operators,” Tinseth told media.

“And then you have future business models. ” Then you also have the current airlines which may change their business models to suit a new game-changing aircraft type.

In June Aviation Week and Space Technology published a report conducted by its parent Aviation Week/Penton Media Research and Bank of America Merrill Lynch which produced some fascinating results.

According to Aviation Week’s Jens Flottau, “some of the results are surprising and show how technologically challenging such a project would be for the manufacturer that chooses to launch an aircraft in the category. ” The first surprise he said was that “airlines, traditionally conservative when it comes to innovations that are challenging too much of their operational status quo, seem to be prepared to reintroduce widebodies into medium-haul flying. ” The survey found that 60 per cent of the carriers participating in the survey would consider ordering a small widebody, provided it fits into existing airport gate infrastructure, Flottau said.

“The limitation at many airports is wingspan: a new aircraft cannot be much wider than an Airbus A320 or a Boeing 737 if it is to use narrowbody gates. And wingspan is defined in part by the range requirement, which leads to the next challenge: Of the airlines interested in buying a MOM jet, 22 per cent would need a range of 4,000-5,000nm, 24 per cent would want 3,000-3,999nm and another 23 per cent want only 2,000-2,999nm,” Flottau noted.

And in a twist that makes things more complex again is that almost half of the airlines surveyed that would buy a MOM aircraft have defined their preferred two-class seating capacity as being 150-199 seats.

“Only 27 per cent want 200-249 seats, and many fewer want an even larger aircraft. Those answers suggest a new midsize aircraft does not have to be larger than 250 seats, and its smallest variant could be smaller than Boeing and Airbus currently think,” Flottau said.

The survey also points to airlines suggesting that the MOM aircraft would also be a replacement for the 737 and A320.

That is a concept first highlighted by Australian Aviation in our August 2015 article “Mission Impossible” which raised the question that the “757 replacement will likely be the basis for a 737 replacement with the longer 240-seat model coming first and the ‘baseline’ 200-seat aircraft coming later next decade. ” At the time, Boeing sources told Australian Aviation while everything is on the table and fluid, the “twin-aisle 757 replacement” being the (stretched) basis for the 737 replacement is “intriguing” while another couched it as “fascinating. ” What will be fascinating is to see how this latest episode in the ‘Sporty Game’ plays out.

One senses after a one-hour round table at Farnborough that Boeing’s chairman Muilenburg is a very good poker player and is not giving anything away.

It is almost inconceivable to think that in its 100th year Boeing has lost the will – or ability – to build a world beater.