Dubai Air Show approaches: it's "U-Turn Al" Showtime again!

Every politician knows it: things can change! But there is no competition to as fast as things change in Doha at the headquarter of the 5 star airline Qatar.
Not long ago Qatar was seen as one of the launch customers for the Boeing B777-X. In fact it was the chief itself claiming that the airline wants to be the first customer for the new aircraft family - Aspire Aviation just yesterday published a long piece about the B777X and speculated about the first customers.
But now everything has changed - at least in the mind of "U-Turn Al" (it is about time that he gets an entry in wikipedia I guess). Suddenly Qatar Airways is "not interested" in ordering the B777X.
For now, we should add - or for just that event yesterday in Doha. Of course, things could change again. And Qatar might want to be the launch customer for...well - maybe the A350-1100, because John Leahy told him that this aircraft would be better? Just a very wild guess and I find it's more likely that Al will turn his stance again and order the B777X after Boeing gave him the right discount.

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?