Visitors to this year's Paris Air Show, which opened on yesterday, will be able to walk around, inside, and through Boeing's Sonic Cruiser, a futuristic new passenger jet that will fly just shy of the sound barrier. They can marvel at the sleek new twin-engine plane, with its tapered fuselage, delta-shaped wing and unusual front stabilizer.
At least they will have the illusion of doing so, for they will be looking at an elaborate hologram -- a perfect image, perhaps, for a plane that so far exists almost exclusively in the minds of Boeing executives and designers. The image alone, though, has been enough to add spice to the world's biggest aircraft rivalry. With it, Boeing has managed to steal the spotlight from its archrival, Airbus Industrie, on its home turf at the biggest aerospace event of the year.
"It will be neat," Alan Mulally, the chief of Boeing's commercial airplane division, said of the hologram during a recent interview in New York.
The Boeing Web site states boldly that the twin-engine Sonic Cruiser "will change the way the world flies as dramatically as did the introduction of the jet age." But the flickering, ghostlike hologram may not be the image the company wants to project.
Since it stunned Airbus and the rest of the global aerospace industry in March by announcing its intention to build a new, faster plane -- and, on the same day, by canceling two proposed models that were not attracting orders -- competitors, partners, airlines and analysts have been wondering if the Sonic Cruiser is more than a mirage. Without doubt, a faster plane can be built. The question is whether the new Boeing jet can make money for airlines and meet strict noise and pollution standards.
"Can they do it?" said Roy Harris, the former assistant director of research and engineering at NASA's Langley Research Center. "I can't say that for sure right now. I think it will be a challenge." And there are questions about whether the Sonic Cruiser, an unofficial name coined by Boeing, will be as big a change for travelers as the company is advertising. The new plane is expected to fly only 12 to 16 percent faster than today's passenger jets. By contrast, the supersonic Concorde, built by the French and British in the late 1960s, can fly more than twice as fast (though it has been grounded since a crash last summer).
The Sonic Cruiser is not yet even in its infancy. Boeing is not close to saying how many passengers it will carry, how far it will fly or what it will cost. Indeed, the company announced it at an earlier phase of development than other models and has put the tightest disclosure restraints in memory on engine makers, important collaborators on the project, several executives said.
Great game of poker
The timing and secrecy have caused some experts to question whether the new jet is a chimera intended to freeze the market just as Airbus, the only other maker of large passenger jets in the world, is filling out its product line with the new A380 superjumbo. The same day it announced the Sonic Cruiser, Boeing shelved a bigger version of its venerable 747, known as the 747X and intended to combat the A380, after failing to persuade a single airline to buy it.
"Was this planned, or a reaction to the success of the A380?" asked Byron K. Callan, an aerospace analyst at Merrill Lynch in New York. "Was Boeing headed down this path all along, or just playing a great game of poker?"
RSS