The famous Paris International Air Show opened Monday amidst troubled times for the airline industry with plummeting sales, employee layoffs, canceled orders, rising oil prices, and the recent as-yet unexplained crash of Air France Flight 447.
Against the cloudy backdrop, key airline manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus expressed optimism at the show. Scott Carson, president and chief executive of Boeing's commercial aircraft division, told reporters on Monday that he believes the recessionary downturn in the commercial aircraft market has hit bottom.
"Are we down in the dumps about the status of this industry? Have we allowed the current economic situation to overwhelm us and discourage us from the path ahead? The answer is absolutely no," said Carson. "At this point it appears to us that the economic conditions have bottomed. If they have bottomed and a recovery comes next year, I think we have a shot at getting through."
Boeing has been hard at work prepping its new 787 Dreamliner airline. The new plane had been hit by severe delays over the past year but seems to be on the launch pad for an upcoming test flight. Hopes were high at the air show that visitors might be the first to witness the 787 in action. But Boeing didn't want to rush things.
"If you were expecting the 787 to fly during the air show you will be disappointed," said Carson. "If it had happened during the air show, it would have been great, but it was never our intention. The airplane will fly when it is completely ready."
Meanwhile, France's Airbus has reason to pop the champagne. In one of the show's few orders for commercial aircraft, Qatar Airways said on Monday it would buy 24 of Airbus' top-selling A320 planes for $1.9 billion. This is an increase in Qatar's order of four A321 airlines announced last year.
Airbus had already expressed a positive tone at a press conference ahead of the show on Saturday. Hit by 21 canceled orders so far this year, Airbus chief executive officer Tom Enders said the cancellations are helping to trim the company's order backlog of 3,500 airliners that it must still deliver.
"The weak sisters have left the backlog," noted Enders. "I'm quite happy that some of the order backlog is melting down."
Enders believes Airbus will still deliver the same number of aircraft this year as it did last year, a record 483, and now an amount helped by Qatar's A320 order.
The Paris International Air Show is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. The show runs every two years, and organizers expect close to 300,000 visitors this year, around the same as in 2007. More than 2,000 companies are exhibiting.
On July 8, 2007, Boeing officially unveiled its 787 Dreamliner, an event that was largely symbolic, since the date corresponded to the plane's name: 7-8-7. But on Thursday, Boeing said that the plane won't make its first flight until at least the second quarter of 2009.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but on Thursday Boeing announced revised first flight and first delivery dates for its long-awaited and much-anticipated, but also troubled 787 Dreamliner.
The aviation giant said it now expects the first 787 flight during the second quarter of 2009, and the delivery of the first Dreamliner in the first quarter of 2010.
Prior to Thursday's announcement, Boeing had said the first flight would be in the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first delivery in the third quarter of 2009. But even those dates differed from what Boeing had predicted on July 8, 2007 (07/08/07) when it suggested at the roll-out event for the 787 that the first flight would be in August or September of 2007 and the first commercial passengers in May of 2008.
In its announcement, Boeing pinned the blame for the latest 787 delays on a machinists strike that shut the program down from early September to November of this year.
Now, the company says it is trying to figure out how the latest delays will affect its delivery plan, and what the financial impact will be.
But one thing is clear: Boeing needs to get the 787 program on its feet and up in the air, to mix metaphors. Yet, while the program has had its share of delays, there was recently a sign that at the very least, it is a fundamentally sound project: an intended-to-be-secret dossier recently put together by Boeing's archrival Airbus about the 787 Dreamliner seemed to indicate that the program was solid.
"(T)ake a look at the document," wrote aviation blogger Jon Ostrower on Flightblogger. Nowhere does it say that the program isn't going to work or that the plane isn't going to fly. At the end of the day, the report is a vindication of the program."
Now, Boeing just needs to follow through on that promise. The world is watching.
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