Boeing, Boeing…. Not Gone?
Perhaps now, having announced its commitment to produce the 7E7 “Dreamliner” one day before the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brother’s pioneering flight at Kitty Hawk (a clever attempt to link the 7E7 with milestones in the history of flight?), Boeing will let us know whether its previous commercial aviation proposal was actually a big bluff. We’re talking here about the Sonic Cruiser, whose primary selling point was increased speed for shorter trips. Under the bluff scenario, Boeing lulled Airbus into thinking Boeing would use the Sonic Cruiser mainly to appeal to a few higher-paying customers , and thereby largely cede international mass transportation to Airbus’s under-development A380, a 555-passenger jumbo jet that is more efficient than the venerable Boeing 747. Now, it turns out Boeing is going to build an aircraft that can provide nimble, efficient, international point-to-point service between many small-city pairs, while the A380 will be limited by size and passenger numbers to serve only the biggest hubs. (For more on what makes the 7E7 tick, read TR Senior Editor David Talbot’s article, “Boeing’s Flight for Survival.”)
Walt Gillette, a key 7E7 vice president, insisted to Talbot in an interview last year that no bluffing was involved. And that’s probably true–the Sonic Cruiser made sense during a booming economy with high-paying passengers, conditions that no longer prevail. On the other hand, the best poker players never show the hands they won by bluffing.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.