Project Ozark Lives

The 1500th 747 delivery came and went without much fanfare. That was disappointing to me. But...

More news of orders for the 747-8, specifically for the Intercontinental, are mentioned in this Aviation Week article. The article makes the 747-8, more than ever, sound like a continuous work in progress to eke out better and better economics. As far as I know, this is a new style of business for Boeing. The first 747-400s performed about as well as the ones that rolled out 10+ years later.

Lufthansa says the aircraft is meeting original specs, but they want more. Boeing seems willing to bend over backwards to keep the model in production. They've removed 9,000 pounds, and they want to remove more. They want to raise MTOW over a million pounds, and they want to extend real world range over 8,200 nautical miles. These are all part of Project Ozark, which is Boeing's program name covering all of these continued improvements.

Leeham has once again rained on the parade, with more pragmatic doom and gloom. Let's hope Boeing can prove them wrong.

At least it's good to have so much discussion still going on about the 747. It was getting pretty quiet for a while there, and that's what I found really disconcerting.

One Million Dollars Per Year

The title sums up the results of the performance improvements being introduced on new 747-8s. One million in fuel costs saved per frame, per year. The improvements itemized:

• 7,700 lbs removed
• 1.8% fuel burn reduction in the engines
• Tail tank enabled, with software modification to keep fuel in the tail to reduce the need for trim.
• FMC improvements, including RNP AR and improved climb functions
• 3.5% fuel burn improvement overall

These improvements will all be delivering this year. Boeing plans on continuing to improve the performance of the 747-8 as well. In a few more years it might actually take off with empty tanks and land twelve hours later with them overflowing.

In other rumors, Cathay's 14th frame has shown up on the charts, although it has yet to be ordered. Another interesting thing is line 1435 (RC021), the current test frame for the above improvements and former Lufthansa D-ABYE, is once again listed internally as earmarked for Lufthansa. This could be a clerical error, but I'm hopeful Lufthansa has had a change of heart.

I've Got Good News and Bad News...

First the bad: Boeing is lowering their production rate to 1.5 frames a month, 18 a year, down from 1.75 a month, or 21 a year. This doesn't really bother me, because I'd forgotten they were actually at 1.75 and not already at 1.5. This rate extends the current backlog to approximately three years.

Now the good: Project Ozark is a big deal (thanks to Mario Felarca for the link). Not only is Boeing continuing to improve the 747-8, but they have ambitious targets they want to reach, including an 8500 nautical mile range. Boeing doesn't design their planes in a vacuum. They rely on customer input, so there must be some substantial interest in jumbo jets with this kind of range (the newest A380s will also have an 8500 nm range). An easy guess would be the Middle Eastern carriers, but it very well could be anyone. Well maybe not anyone. I doubt it's Southwest Airlines or Air Koryo. I'm speculating that one of the targets is Emirates, possibly as a replacement for some of their A380s when they start to retire them. I think Qantas could be another target.

Lastly, GE is looking at software changes to stop icing in the cores of their 747-8 engines. This event has happened a couple times now, but hasn't caused a real emergency yet thanks to having three spare engines on each jet. What scares me more about this issue is the prospect of it happening on a 787, which shares very similar engines to the 747-8, but only has two.