The Boeing
Company said yesterday that it
was scrapping plans to build a
futuristic high-speed plane
called the Sonic Cruiser in
favor of designing a
fuel-efficient aircraft.
Boeing's
announcement brings to an end
one of the most imaginative
— and some say quixotic —
projects in recent aerospace
engineering. Over the course
of almost two years, Boeing
executives said the company
was putting together a new jet
that would fly 15 to 20
percent faster than today's
commercial planes.
But what
really ignited the public's
interest was the proposed
design of the Sonic Cruiser.
Looking like something from
George Lucas's drawing board,
it was pitched as a sleek
bullet-shaped tube with two
large wings in the rear and
two smaller wings behind the
cockpit.
What Boeing
discovered was that there was
little demand for the plane.
With the airline industry
mired in the worst downturn in
its history and losing
billions of dollars each year,
no airline wanted to purchase
an expensive jet geared toward
business travelers. Such
passengers were no longer
paying for high-price tickets,
and many airline executives
raised doubts about whether
extra speed could really pry
open travelers' wallets.
Alan Mulally,
the chief executive of Boeing
Commercial Airplanes, said
yesterday at a news conference
in Seattle that Boeing would
turn its attention to building
a plane that would be 17 to 20
percent more fuel efficient
than the 767. The company
plans to introduce the plane
in 2004, with a first delivery
in 2008. There are no orders
for the new plane yet.
"We
will move the vast majority of
our resources and energy to
the super-efficient
airplane," Mr. Mulally
said. "I feel probably
the future and what we can do
and our direction is more
clear now than ever
before."
He said the
new plane would look like the
popular narrow-body 777 rather
than Flash Gordon's
planet-hopping rocket. He
declined to give a cost
estimate for research and
development. The construction
of the plane will not
necessarily take place in the
Seattle area, where Boeing has
its commercial airplane
operations.
Shares of
Boeing rose 46 cents
yesterday, to close at $32.71.
Boeing has
been looking for years to
develop a product that will
help it pull out of a
financial slump. Last October,
it reported a 43 percent
decline in third-quarter
earnings from the period a
year earlier. The company also
scaled back its revenue
projections for 2003 to $50
billion from $52 billion and
said that it would deliver
only 275 to 285 planes next
year, down from earlier
estimates of 275 to 300.
Mr. Mulally
said yesterday that deliveries
in 2004 would be about the
same as in 2003. The company
expects to deliver 380 planes
this year.
Analysts
said Boeing's announcement did
not come as much of a
surprise, since it had been
hinting for a long time that
it might use the research from
its Sonic Cruiser project to
develop another jet. And they
said Boeing seemed to be
making the right decision,
given the bleak outlook of the
marketplace.
"The
Sonic Cruiser was a concept-
car kind of idea," said
Nicolas Owens, an analyst at
Morningstar. "A lot of
concept cars show up at the
auto show and never hit the
street. And that's O.K. It's a
way to test the waters. There
was a small, small market for
the Sonic Cruiser to begin
with."
Steven
Binder, an analyst at Bear,
Stearns, said: "Customers
over the last six months have
made it clear that they would
prefer to have a low-cost
conventional jet serving the
250-seat market. I think they
can grab market share in the
future with a low-cost
conventional jet versus the
Sonic Cruiser."
Mr. Mulally
said that Boeing might be able
to sell upward of 3,000 of the
new jets and that they would
have broad market appeal
because they could be used as
a replacement for various
planes made by both Boeing and
Airbus.
Airbus,
which is based in Toulouse,
France, has been gnawing away
at Boeing's market share over
the last several years. Airbus
plans to deliver 300 planes
next year, and it has already
begun building the A-380, a
555-seat behemoth. In October,
Airbus dealt a big blow to
Boeing when it won a 120-jet
order from EasyJet, the
low-cost carrier based outside
London.
Boeing said
yesterday that it believed
that it was making a smarter
gamble than Airbus by betting
that the increasing popularity
of point-to-point service
would mean that airlines would
want smaller, more efficient
planes rather than large ones
built for big hub transfers.
"The
average number of passengers
per airplane has continued to
go down," Mr. Mulally
said. "I feel more
confident than ever over the
last three or four years that
this is the next airplane
Boeing needs to make."
This is the
second time in the last
several years that Boeing has
shelved plans for a
high-profile commercial jet
project; it decided not to
build a larger version of its
747 in favor of pursuing the
Sonic Cruiser.