First A220 order

It was just hours after Airbus officially renamed the CS300 to A220-300 when the first order under Airbus control came in yesterday. Jetblue ordered 60 A220-300 and took options for another 60 (per a MoU).
Also, Jetblue converted their order for A320neo to the larger A321neo, now having 85 A321neo on order but no A320neo anymore.
The 60 firm A220-300 will be delivered by H1 2025, the options would be delivered from 2025 onwards.
by that time the oldest A320ceo in Jetblue's fleet are 25 years old - time to say goodbye maybe? But then what? Jetblue could have ordered A320neo again, of course. But what if there would be a A220--500 (formerly known as CS500) by then? Maybe we have already seen a (tentative) launch order for the A220-500...

Boeing creating a new market?

Air Transport World today reports that Buckingham Research expects Boeing to forego reengining the 737NG, a move still anticipated by a "meaningful number of investors" in the case that a Boeing customer would defect to Airbus.
But Buckingham noted that Boeing might be so capacity constrained in terms of orders that it might not have the possibility to reengine.
Instead of reengining Boeing would move to an all new aircraft, probably a new light twin-aisle. As I laid out before, such an aircraft would not make sense starting in the current lower capacity end of the 737, so I would guess (if true) that this aircraft would start where the 737-800 is today. The upper end then could be where the  757-300 is, just below the 787-8. That would then fill a niche, because today there are no new aircraft build in this segment - well, one could consider the Tu-204, but this aircraft is almost dead and even not competitive with the 757.
Buckingham says that Boeing would continue to improve the 737NG and is internally convinced that the 2016 737NG is competitive with the A320neo. Boeing earlier stated that the 737NG line could be open until 2026.
A move described by Buckingham would be both smart and risky:

• Risky as it is not clear if customers really will think that a more than 40 year old design will be competitive. Until then the CSeries is in the market, a similar Embraer aircraft could be on the way to the market, making the 737-700 obsolete - the backlog of the -700 is shrinking anyway (as well as the A319). The cabin diameter will still be the 737's problem, as people tend to get larger - vertically, but even worse: horizontally.
• Smart as it opens a new market field for Boeing and by that getting out of the competition with Bombardier, Embraer, the Chinese, the Russians and, to some extent, Airbus. Although for now it remains unclear if the new aircraft will have transcontinental or transatlantic range, the aircraft could be (with the right level of technology) better than the A321neo even if it is designed for more range to enable all 757 missions flown today.

But is there a huge market for these aircraft? At the lower end for sure, as the 737-800 shows - but there would be the problem. If I have two aircraft in my shop, which one should I sell the customer. The same problem appeared when Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas and the MD-95 became the B717. The B717 had to die, as it was a stand-alone aircraft, not part of a family - Boeing sold the 737-600 to SAS although the B717 would have been much better in costs for the SAS missions.
And what about Southwest, by far the largest Boeing customer today? They just ordered the 737-800, but all of their other (500+) aircraft have less than 150 seats and they also like the B717 as an addition with even lower capacity. I cannot imagine Southwest going to an all 180+ seater fleet in the future just to keep being a Boeing customer. And I cannot imagine that incremental improvements to the 737-700 are enough to keep them from defecting to Bombardier (they might one day decide to build a CS500, although saying differently, Embraer or even Airbus.
There were "just" about 757's build - for sure Boeing counts on creating a new big market segment when they really build that small twin-aisle. The question is, if that market segment will be there when the aircraft appears...

Boeing 737 successor Part III

We still have to wait about 3 months until we probably hear from Boeing what their plan is regarding the future of the B737. But if you read what the Boeing CFO this week said at the JP Morgan Aviation, Transportation and Defense Conference in New York, one has to question why Boeing should develop a new airplane at all.
If Boeing believes what their CFO James Bell told the audience, Airbus just closes today's gap between the A320 and the B737-800 with the introduction of the NEO. So why then doing something at all? If both big players are on-par, they could go on and share 50% of the market each - at least above the 150 seat level, where Bombardier reportedly will not offer a CS500 (and the announcement of collaboration with COMAC sheds some light on this) and Irkut and COMAC will have a long way to be a player in the the market.
So where is the incentive for Boeing to spend some $10 billion on a new aircraft with all the technical risk involved, but still staying with a conventional tube-and-wing design and the risk that Airbus will follow a few years later leapfrogging the 797 with an unconventional, radical new design.
The low-risk and low-cost solution would be what Airbus says Boeing will do: follow with a re-engined B737 and let the engine maker(s) pay for most of the cost, as now does Airbus (Udvar-Hazy made some comments about this at the ISTAT).
There are just two things that could lead Boeing to design a new aircraft:

1. Their statement that the re-engining only closes the gap is not true and in reality the NEO's are far better in costs then the NG's. The steadily rising oil price is in favor of the NEO cash operating costs right now and there is probably nobody out there who will predict oil at below $80/barrel in the future. But a re-engining could close that gap - maybe not entirely, but close enough, so that by "adjusting" the purchase price (see A340-600) for the aircraft should be good enough to sell the aircraft.
2. The basic design of the 737, namely the narrow cabin is too old to be attractive for airlines in the future. This is somehow contrasted by the good response to the Sky interior just introduced for the B737NG.

Bottom line: I am not convinced that Boeing will show the world a B797 in Paris - at least not this year...

There is more about that here:
Part I
Part II
Part IV

CSeries impact

Last year I wrote an entry about what the Bombardier CSeries meant for aircraft development. Meanwhile Airbus announced the A320NEO programme on Dec 1st, 2010 and announced first customers. I expect more to come forward in the next weeks and months - by the time the Paris Air Show ends, Airbus could have 500+ orders (or at least MoU-like commitments) for the A320NEO in the books.
If you read how Southwest is now pushing Boeing to clarify it's plans for the B737, you can clearly see how the decision by Bombardier to lauch the CSeries affected the whole development cycle:
Virgin America, the launch customer of the A320NEO, looked very seriously to buy the CS300 - it was only when Airbus came forward with the NEO that Virgin decided to stay with Airbus. So, very clearly: without the CSeries there would not be a NEO to buy!
Boeing has to and will react - until lately I was not convinced that they would do a 737 successor. My thoughts were, like John Leahy, that they would announce a reengining of the 737 soon after a launch of the NEO. In the meantime I am a little bit more convinced that they could announce a new narrowbody. Scott Hamilton recently argued why. If Boeing is right to think that the A350-1000 will enter airline service not before 2019 is on another piece of paper - but if they are convinced, it would make sense to do the narrowbody first - well, if it is a narrowbody! It could also be the long-discussed small widebody, starting at around the capacity of todays 737-800 and going up to the capacity of the 757-300. They would leave the 150 seater market to Airbus and possibly Bombardier (CS500?) and maybe Embraer, but they would have another big market for themselves.
At the EADS press conference CEO Louis Gallois thought loudly about a tie-up between OEM's, as the market place gets increasingly crowded during the next decade. There were speculations then that Airbus could partner with Embraer and Boeing with Bombardier - I could also see some cooperations with the japanese Heavies, as I wrote earlier. All this will not happen this year, but the possibility - and good reasons - are there for it that it will happen sometime.

CSeries expansion

AirInsight today has this piece about the possibility that Bombardier may expand the CSeries family beyond the CS100 and CS300 with CS500 and CS900 called 150- and 190-seaters. While at least the 150 seater would look like a good top end of the product line, the question is how to position it in the marketplace. If the 150 seater should have the same range as the CS100/300 (close to 3000nm), the aircraft would need a larger engine with higher thrust. Therefore Bombardier would have to raise the landing gear - the problem with that is...well, ask Boeing!
But there is another possibility: keep the MTOW at the CS300ER level - how many airlines are out there flying more than 2000nm with today's narrowbody. According to RR just about 3%.
So the CS500 might be a possibility. But I doubt there will be a 5 abreast 190 seater. This would be a too tube - just my two cents.
A driver for the 150 seater could be that Embraer thinks about a new aircraft. If they choose to place their aircraft sizewise above the CS100/300, Bombardier might be forced to react.
Interesting times ahead - Embraer should be ready to announce their plans in the next six months.
But how could Embraer pay for all this? To come up with a good CSeries competitor, they would have to be able to produce a carbon wing, for example. - Maybe they let Brasil, Argentina, Chile, South Africa and some other countries pay for it - via the KC-390 tanker development.

UPDATE: There was a suspension letter filed on October 4th, 2010 for the CS900. A 5 abreast 190-seater would have been a little bit of a too-far stretch, anyway. Or was is meant to be the name for a CRJ900 replacement? Very speculative of course...