Douglas Unveils 2 Jets, Drops Prop Fan
McDonnell Douglas Corp. unveiled two new passenger jetliners Tuesday at its Douglas Aircraft unit in Long Beach and disclosed that it is dropping further development of the revolutionary prop fan aircraft in which the company and its partners have invested more than $100 million.
The two new aircraft, the MD-90 series, will feature a conventional turbofan jet engine built by an international consortium, including the American manufacturer Pratt & Whitney and the British firm Rolls-Royce. Other participants in the project include West German, Italian and Japanese firms.
“After a number of years of research, this is what the customers are telling us they want,” said Walter J. Orlowski, MD-90 general manager.
The MD-90 aircraft family is derived from the MD-80 series aircraft, which in turn was based on the 1960s-era DC-9 jetliner. Short on the financial muscle of its competitors, Douglas has stretched, shrunk and repackaged its older aircraft throughout the 1980s.
With its commitment to the MD-90, which will be offered in two sizes, the company has laid out its product plans for the rest of century, Douglas Vice President John D. Wolf said Tuesday. The firm previously unveiled the MD-11, a wide-body derivative of its DC-10 that it hopes to begin delivering next year.
The MD-90 will be powered by the V2500 engine, produced by the consortium International Aero Engines. One version of the new airliner would carry 153 passengers and a second version would carry 114 passengers. Fuel efficiency would be increased by 13% for the smaller aircraft and 17% for the larger one, over comparable MD-80 jets.
Douglas has begun talks with airlines to obtain MD-90 orders and hopes to begin making deliveries of the jets as early as the fourth quarter of 1994. Wolf declined to say how many orders the McDonnell board will require before launching production of the aircraft or how much the firm planned to invest in the new aircraft series. Financial analysts estimated the development cost at $300 million to $500 million.
The decision to drop the four-year project to develop the prop fan, which used exposed propellers rather than internal fan blades, ends the high hopes Douglas had expressed only last year when it said the technology would leap over that of its rivals, Boeing and Airbus Industrie.
At a public debut of an experimental prototype of the prop fan in February, 1988, Douglas officials boasted that the aircraft would improve fuel efficiency by as much as 40% over its existing aircraft.
But the company could not obtain a single order for the prop fan aircraft, because airlines were concerned about the risk of the new technology and because the aircraft cost substantially more than a conventionally powered jetliner, Wolf said.
The gamble to develop the prop fan was based on the belief that jet fuel prices would rise substantially during the 1980s, but prices have remained flat. A Douglas marketing official remarked Tuesday that it would take a virtual doubling of the current 70 cents a gallon price of jet fuel to induce airlines to buy a prop fan.
Analyst Reaction
While Wolf declined to discuss the specific cost estimates of either the old prop fan or the new MD-90s, Douglas officials estimated in February that the prop fan would cost $7 million to $8 million more than the $25 million MD-87 jetliner.
“Our customers indicated they were not interested in buying it,” Wolf said.
Aerospace analysts reacted favorably to the news that Douglas had dropped the prop fan and came up with the MD-90.
“In going with the International Aero engines they have made the right choice in terms of the next generation of engines,” said Lawrence M. Harris of Bateman Eichler, Hill Richards Inc. “Although their existing backlog extends until the mid-1990s, it was clear that they needed to do something in terms of a more fuel-efficient engine.”
In addition to new engines, the MD-90s will have an updated cockpit, a new auxiliary power system and an electrically powered control surface called an elevator. The larger version of the MD-90 would require a 57-inch elongation of the fuselage forward of the wing, Wolf said.
