Hazy has deal to buy ILFC

Bloomberg News has a story quoting the head of mega-lessor saying he has a deal to buy International Lease Finance Corp. from insurance giant AIG.

ILFC is the largest customer of Airbus and Boeing. It owns and manages a fleet of slight more than 1,000 planes with a value of $55 billion.

This is a highly positive development for the airline industry. But as is often the case, the devil is in the details. The deal has to close (next year) and it remains to be seen how it is structured and what flexibility the company has in the future.

Boeing and the Southern strategy?

Steve Wilhelm of the Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle) has a long story about Southern states “eyeing” Boeing in the wake of the IAM strike. Speculation has been rampant (in peaks and valleys) that Boeing might be fed up with its unions in heavily unionized Washington State and be looking South when it comes time to build its next airplane (or two).

One quote from the story that is filled with irony is:

“If I was a Boeing executive, I’d look at the state of Alabama and see there’s a qualified work force … I’d take a look at the assets we have,” said Stephen Nodine, president of the Mobile County Commission, whose offices are in Mobile, Ala.

Alabama, of course, is the proposed site for the Northrop Grumman/Airbus KC-30 tanker proposed in competition with Boeing’s KC-767, which will be assembled in the Seattle area if Boeing ultimately wins the contract. But what is more ironic is that Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems denigrated the skills of the Alabama workers during the tanker competition, suggesting they might have trouble building a tricycle if Northrop got the tanker contract. (It apparently mattered not that IDS has a large facility in Huntsville, AL.) Boeing’s Commercial unit cringed at the IDS statement because the Northrop/Airbus production model isn’t that different from BCA’s assembly model, including the high-profile 787 program (in which case IDS may have a point) but to a lesser degree with the 767 itself.

And speaking of tankers, Northrop didn’t even wait for the new Congress and the new president to take office before resuming the tanker wars with an advertisement that got the Pentagon’s chief purchaser up in arms (so to speak). Read about this one here and here.

We criticized Northrop for being slow off the PR and advertising mark in 2007, letting Boeing’s well-oiled machine set the agenda and frame the debate. (Once Northrop got running, it did make up for lost ground and scored some great PR/advertising hits.) But this advertisement, and more so it’s timing, strikes us as very premature. Nobody knows who the decision-makers in the Pentagon will be (and in any event, they shouldn’t be influenced by ads) and we doubt Members of Congress are paying much attention to the tanker debate right now anyway. With four million people expected for the inauguration of Barak Obama and the organization of the power structure in Congress, we suspect the Members of Congress might just be focused on something else right now.

Is Boeing fundamentally sound?

Addison Schonland and Richard Aboulafia join us in a 19 minute podcast discussing whether Boeing is fundamentally and structurally sound. This follows comments by Boeing Commercial Airplanes President Scott Carson at a Credit Suisse conference saying so.

Do we agree or disagree? Listen and find out.

Update, November 21:

We inadvertently linked the podcast reference to a nice environmental story-we fixed it. Sorry about that.

Delta to buy from Boeing–and Airbus

James Wallace today confirmed what we predicted from the get-go when Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines announced its merger months ago: that Delta, long a solid Boeing customer, will buy from Airbus.

Wallace is the aerospace writer for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer; his story may be found here.

747-8 delayed by 9 months

Boeing just announced what we were the first to predict nearly a year ago: flight testing and delivery of the 747-8 will be delayed. The press release is here.

Boeing announced a nine month-long delay, in part due to engineering resource issues. We’ve been reporting a creeping delay in the program, initially six months, then nine and most recently one year. Customers tell us they expect a year’s delay.

Meanwhile, the French news service AFP reports Airbus may not deliver all  A380s next year originally planned. This short item is here.