Boeing Plans to Intensify Talks on New Jet Once Max Returns
Boeing Plans to Intensify Talks on New Jet Once Max Returns
(Bloomberg) -- Boeing Co. expects to hold serious discussions with airlines about the company’s next big family of planes after it tackles the crisis surrounding its best-selling 737 Max.
The Chicago-based planemaker will intensify efforts to seek views from carriers on its new midmarket airplane after the Max returns to service, Ihssane Mounir, Boeing’s senior vice president for global sales of commercial planes, said at the Singapore Airshow on Wednesday.
“We haven’t really engaged in the next phase yet, with the customers, and we’re just starting to do that,” Mounir said. “We’ve learned a lot. The exercise has been very rich in terms of inputs, and I’m pretty excited about next phase of this exercise now that we’re taking another fresh look at it.”
This comes after Chief Executive Officer Dave Calhoun ordered a rethink of the NMA project last month, following aggressive discussions with customers. Pushing through Boeing’s pipeline of jetliners will be one of Calhoun’s important tests as CEO after the company puts the Max crisis behind it.
A year ago, Boeing was deep into planning for the NMA, envisioned as a family of twin-aisle jets that would haul between 220 and 270 or so passengers. The model’s frame would be an unusual ovoid shape, offering roomier passenger cabins and smaller cargo compartments. But program managers never closed a business case that included the challenge of bringing production costs for a complex twin-aisle jet closer to those of a single-aisle plane.
Airbus SE’s A321XLR, the latest and longest version of its A320-family of jets, is already starting to eat into the potential market for the NMA, making it crucial for Boeing to take a call on the project. The NMA was initially expected to debut by the middle of this decade, just after Airbus starts delivering the XLR.
To contact the reporters on this story: Kyunghee Park in Singapore at kpark3@bloomberg.net;Anurag Kotoky in New Delhi at akotoky@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Young-Sam Cho at ycho2@bloomberg.net
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