Widebody Order Gap Update post PAS15

Here is another round of the "Widebody Order Gap" analysis.

First have a look at the A330, as more happened here than at the Boeing side.
Saudia became the launch customer for the regional version of the A330 at the Paris Air Show. ordering 20 aircraft. Another A330-200 was ordered by ALC and there are commitments from EVA Air for four A330.
Since then South Korea choose the A330 MRTT as their next tanker and will order four of the type.
Finally, China will order 45 A330 and has an option for a further 30.

Widebody Order Gap Update - B777 and A330

Leeham News and Comment has a story today that both Jet Airways and Kenya Airways want to get rid of their B777-300ER. Jet Airways has ten of the type while Kenya Airways has three. Scott Hamilton notes that this could build up to the pressure for Boeing to sell the last B777-300ER until the B777X will go into service in late 2019 the earliest. So let us have a look how many B777-300ER (and B777F) Boeing needs to sell to bridge production without any cut. Also, have a look how Airbus

Airbus Order and Deliveries 2013

The final numbers for orders and deliveries from Airbus came out yesterday. There were no big surprises - just a few things to clarify...
The "mystery buyer" of 100 A320 appears to be Air China and Shenzen. Compare the numbers that Airbus reports to the numbers when the upcoming order was announced back in May.
I have no clue however who is the unidentified customer for the 20 A320neo. Loong was reported to have ordered 20 A320 at the end of December, but this should be a mix of 11 A320ceo and 9 A320neo and this order is missing in the 2013 table.
There are quite a few A320ceo&neo orders to be firmed up in 2014:

• VietJet for 20 ceo and 42 neo
• Qingdao for 5 ceo and 18 neo
• Spring for 30 ceo
• Lybian Wings for 4 neo
• Hong Kong Aviation for 60 neo
• CASC for 42 ceo (but that could disappear now that individual chinese airlines place orders themselves)

as well as

• Doric for 20 A380
• Chinese airlines for some more A330

So the offical goal of  book-to-bill just simply greater than 1 does not seem overambitious. Chinese airlines are still behind in the race for reengined narrowbodies, despite the 100 A320 order and probably some of the unidentified orders for the B737MAX coming from China. So I guess we will see some more A320neo and B737MAX (maybe also CSeries) orders from China this year.
An announcement to increase production for the A320ceo before production ends and for the A320neo to a range of about 50 per month seems to be inevitable and we should expect it soon.

The possibility of a A330neo was downplayed by Airbus officials yesterday. It would be just one option and not the main one...of course they have to downplay the possibility as long as possible as they have to protect sales of the existing model. But I would not be surprised if we would see a move in the first half of the year.

Fifth Season Time in Toulouse

The end of the year is near and so it is fifth season time again for John Leahy. Tomorrow we will see if he can sell some 60-90 aircraft to Air Canada, believed to be A320neo and A321neo's (or B737MAX-8/-9 if his counterparts at Boeing succeed).
But there are quite some more sales to complete this year and chances are good that Leahy will top the old record from 2011, when the A320neo had it's first full year of sales.
So what can we expect apart from Air Canada? Another awaited order for narrowbodies could come from Monarch. Both Air Canada and Monarch could also put a CSeries order in their shopping cart,

A new chance for the A330neo?

Qatar Airways ever communicating Akbar Al Baker yesterday told the press that Airbus would drop the A350-800. Airbus instantly denied, so nobody can tell for sure what is the fate of the smallest model of the A350 family.

Farnborough Preview

We are only days away from this years largest air show. There are quite a few previews out there, the most extensive I read comes from Scott Hamilton.
First at all - for me the SST mentioned in Scott's post is nothing more than a marketimg gag - at least for the flying public. The program could serve Boeing as a technology platform for military vehicles in the future, but I doubt that we will ever see a thing like that one shown in the post flying (in full scale at least).
But what about the rest?

The Superjet Crash

There are a lot of commentaries about the crash of the Superjet in Indonesia, killing all 45 people on board.
Almost all commentaries point out that future Superjet sales will take a hard hit because of the crash - not so fast, I would say: if the reason for the crash was a pilot error, then why should that hurt sales. In the end the Superjet is a modern design with all the latest western systems in it. Fuel burn could of course be better - the design of the SaM146 engine is, like the PW6000, build upon low maintenance costs, not on lowest fuel consumption.
Remember the crash of one of the earliest A320 in 1988 at Muehlhausen-Habsheim: a pilot error also, but many pilots pointed to the fly-by-wire system of the A320 as the root cause. Did it hurt A320 sales in the long run? Definitely not.
Also the crash of one of the A330 prototypes (due to a wrong autopilot input) did not hurt A330 sales.
So I would be careful to predict a slump in sales for the Superjet - it is too early to draw conclusions before we do not know what happened on board, especially in the cockpit.

Boeing's very ambitious plans

A lot of media articles are out there today covering what Boeing CEO McNerney told the audience at the Cowen and Co. conference: "We're gonna do a new airplane that will go beyond the capability of what the [A320]NEO can do." (Flightblogger has all the quotes)
Well, once Boeing really does a new airplane (in the A320/B737 category), it has to be better than the NEO for sure - otherwise there would be no reason to do it anyway.
But he went further on and said that the B787-10 would be a good replacement for the A330. No argument against that...then he also said, that Boeing is studying upgrades for the B777 (which is not new), but that these are targeted for after an EIS for the B737 replacement, which would be around 2020. In the meantime Boeing could do the 787-10.

??? Please what ???

After the more than three year late 787-8 Boeing should concentrate on delivering the B787-8, developing and the delivering the 787-9 before talking about three(!) new or at least heavily upgraded aircraft. Boeing lost too much credibility since the roll-out of the 787.

Interestingly Teal Group VP Aboulafia forecasted this week that Boeing would have to react against the NEO with a re-engined 737. And also Scott Hamilton reports that studies for the re-engining did not stop.
So by now nothing is certain - despite doing the B787-10, then B737RS and then 777up, it could also be 737RE, then 777up and then, if at all, the 787-10. I don't see an urgent need for the B787-10 anyway, as the 787-9 would pretty much do the job of the A330-300. The 787-10 would probably need a new undercarriage, more thrust than the Trent1000 and the GEnx are capable today and customer needs are diverging in terms of payload and range - a problem that reportedly also faces Airbus with the A350-1000.
I would be very interested to hear what major customers like Southwest are thinking about these ambitious plans...

The Lufthansa Order and what it might tell us

Yesterday, Lufthansa ordered 48 aircraft to be delivered from 2012: 32 A320 family aircraft, eight A330-300 and 8 E195. When I first read the news, I wondered what that order means, when there are more efficient aircraft available in the next years (think of 787 vs. A330, CS100/300 vs. E195 or, further out, A320NEO  vs. A320(current).
To clarify the situation I would like to direct you to Jens Flottau's article in the Aviation Week:
Most of the A320 are for replacement of older A320 or the even older B737 (-300's and -500's). Swiss will get A320's and A321's, but no A319's - that makes sense, as the CS300 would be clearly more efficent. Swiss (via LH) only has ordered 30 CS100 so far, but there are 30 more options which could be converted to CS300 if needed.
So I don't think right now that the A320 order is a vote against the NEO, but it probably all depends on what Boeing does: if they would come up with a 737 replacement by 2020/21, I see LH switching from A. to B. for their (6 abreast) narrowbody fleet in the long run. The CSeries should have it's role also, not only at Swiss, but also as a Avro replacement at Brussels, maybe at Austrian, LH Italia - and who knows what happens to SAS - they would be happy to find a home in the LH Group and expressed interest in the CSeries earlier.
The question why Austrian does not get any new aircraft is sufficiently answered in the article.
Another question that struck me, is: why A330-300's! Why do they not order the B787 or the A350??? Does LH (aka Nico Buchholz) know something about these two natural candidates for A330 replacement we still do not know? Any further (and then probably significant) delay of the B787? Problems in the A350 development program? Fact is that the flight test program of the B787 has slowed down in the last two weeks (as well as the B747-8 flight tests did). Aircraft number 6 is also delayed further.
I guess we will have to wait until the Boeing Q3 earnings call until we hear what is going on there. Until then, have fun with wild guessing...