More seats on the 7E7

Aerospace Notebook: Boeing finds room for more seats on the 7E7

By JAMES WALLACE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The Boeing Co. has managed to squeeze a few more seats into its 7E7 jetliner, bringing the plane closer to the capacity of an Airbus rival.

A company spokeswoman said yesterday that the changes are the result of tweaking the 7E7 interior design, not lengthening the fuselage.

One of the fuselage doors was moved a little, and the plane’s interior taper at the rear was changed to accommodate the additional seats, she said.

As a result, the base version, known as the 7E7-8, will seat 223 passengers in a three-class cabin configuration. That’s up from 217 seats.

The shorter range 7E7-3, which is being developed in parallel with the 7E7-8 and has the same fuselage size, will seat 296 passengers in a two-class configuration, up from 289 seats.

Those two versions will enter service with airlines in 2008.

They will be followed in a year or two by the development of a stretched 7E7-9, which will carry 259 passengers in three classes. That’s up two seats from Boeing’s previous projections.

Boeing said the changes are the result of fine tuning the 7E7 design, with some feedback from airlines — and not a response to the competition.

“We are just making the design more robust,” the spokeswoman said.

Such seating numbers, for Boeing or Airbus, are merely a benchmark. Airlines ultimately decide how many seats they want and the type of cabin configuration.

In a dogfight with Boeing for the middle of the 250-seat airplane market now represented by jets such as the A330 and 767, Airbus recently started offering customers a rival plane known as the A350, which is a derivative of its popular A330. It would enter service a couple years after the 7E7.

One version, the A350-800, based on the smaller A330-200, would seat about 245 passengers in three classes, according to Airbus. The bigger A350-900 would seat 285 passengers in three classes.

In an interview last year, John Leahy, chief commercial officer of Airbus and its noted jetliner salesman, said Boeing’s 7E7 was too small, and the bigger A350 would prove more attractive to airlines because it would carry more passengers and thus have better seat-mile economics — the cost to an airline to carry one passenger one mile.

Boeing has dismissed such Airbus claims, saying the 7E7 is an all-new design rather than a derivative model like the A350. The 7E7 will have superior operating efficiencies regardless of how those are measured, according to Boeing.

The 7E7 design configuration is not expected to be frozen until about midyear.

Meanwhile, Boeing confirmed a report in the trade publication Flight International magazine that the 7E7 “empty” weight is within 2.5 percent of the target for this point in the program.

If not watched closely, weight gains can quickly get out of hand and affect a new plane’s performance when delivered to airlines.

Boeing said the weight gain for the 7E7 is less than that of its 777 jetliner when it was at the same stage of development as the 7E7.

No airplane manufacturer is immune from the constant battle to control a plane’s weight during its design and development.

Airbus has had a weight problem with its new 555-passenger A380, which was unveiled to the world yesterday at its headquarters in Toulouse, France.

But the world’ biggest jetliner is now under its weight target, Airbus said.

The first A380 weighs 0.4 percent to 0.5 percent less than a target of 245 tons when empty, Chief Operating Officer Gustav Humbert told Bloomberg News.

“We can match all the performance guarantees we’ve made to airlines,” Humbert said. “We had a problem with weight” but that was resolved with lighter materials.

In other news, International Lease Finance Corp. may buy as many as 20 Boeing 7E7 airplanes, said the leasing company’s chairman.

The order would be worth $2.4 billion, based a list price of $120 million for each plane. ILFC also may take options for 20 additional 7E7s and expects to complete talks with Boeing in coming weeks, said Steven Udvar- Hazy, chairman and chief executive of ILFC.

“We’re in active discussions with Boeing,” he said. “They are coming in with a new offer, and we hope it will progress as the weeks go by.”

Possible Qatar order: Airbus and Boeing are in talks on supplying as many as 60 of their planned 200- to 300-seat airliners to Qatar Airways, airline Chief Executive Akbar Al Baker said.

The state-owned carrier expects to make a decision between Airbus’ A350 aircraft and Boeing’s 7E7 model by the Paris Air Show in June, Al Baker said in an interview in Toulouse, France, at Airbus’ unveiling of the first A380 airliner.

The airline said in November that it was in talks with Boeing about the 7E7, declining at the time to confirm a Seattle Times report that it may order 30 aircraft and take options for 30 more. Chicago- based Boeing is building the 7E7 to replace the similarly sized 767-model plane by 2008. Airbus plans to put the 245- to 285-seat A350 into service by 2010.

Blogging the A380: Boeing has joined the bloggers. The company said Randy Baseler, its jetliner marketing guru, is writing a blog.

In his blog posted yesterday, Baseler talked about the A380 and its big day in Toulouse.

“The A380 does not mark the beginning of a new stage in commercial aviation; it is the crowning achievement of a bygone era,” he wrote.

“I applaud the achievement,” Baseler said. “But the A380 is flying into the head wind of reality.”

Boeing said it hopes to update Baseler’s blog weekly.