NASA, Boeing Abandon Supersonic Jetliner Project
After NASA poured an estimated $1.6 billion into a risky effort to help Boeing Co. develop a revolutionary supersonic jetliner, the Seattle-based aerospace giant has decided not to build it.
Officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration disclosed this week that they have dropped the research program from their $13.6-billion budget for fiscal 2000. Even before federal officials cut off the money supply, Boeing had slashed its involvement in the project.
With the withdrawal of Boeing--now America’s only aircraft manufacturer--there is no U.S. firm to use the technology. Blueprints and other work developed over the last decade will now sit in NASA archives.
Cancellation of the jetliner research is a blow to NASA, which has a stated commitment to support the commercial aircraft industry, and to air travelers, who now are unlikely to be flying U.S. supersonic jets for decades.
“Boeing’s move out of this program places the U.S.’ long-term economic interests in aero-propulsion technology at risk,” said Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), whose district includes the NASA Lewis Research Center, which oversaw some supersonic work. “We can expect Boeing to do what’s good for Boeing. They did not do what’s good for the United States.”
Under pressure from the Asian financial crisis and a slowdown in orders for its existing aircraft, Boeing said it concluded that it could not invest in such a technologically ambitious project without a ready market. And NASA, faced with mounting costs on the international space station, was forced to cut spending elsewhere in its budget.
“It just wasn’t clear to us that we could make a salable commercial airplane,” said Robert Cuthbertson, Boeing program manager for the so-called High Speed Civil Transport plane.
Under the program, launched in 1990, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas were to design the airframe. General Electric and Pratt & Whitney were to handle the engines.
But in the end, the jetliner project would crash and burn when economic forces and scientific shortfalls collided.
Government-subsidized competitors in Europe and Asia intensified their push into the global aerospace market, and in 1997 left the once-dominant U.S. industry with just a 55% market share, according to the Aerospace Industries Assn.
Pressure mounted on Boeing to compete, but a bid to modernize its manufacturing of the 737 and 777 jetliners backfired, driving its production costs up, said Paul H. Nisbet, aerospace analyst with JSA Research Inc., a Newport, R.I., research firm.
“It was a questionable program to begin with,” Nisbet said of the supersonic jetliner. “They obviously weren’t getting there. How long do you keep throwing money down a rat hole?”
At the same time, the post-Cold War consolidation of the defense industry drove Boeing to acquire McDonnell, leaving NASA just one potential user for the technology.
But the scientists developing it proved unable to deliver a working design. NASA officials said the components they were designing would have met the noise and emissions standards of 2010--the initial completion date for the program.
But Boeing said last fall that it didn’t expect to manufacture the vehicle until perhaps 2020, and began planning to pare back its personnel on the project, including workers at its Long Beach facility.
“We want to slow down and let the technology evolve,” Cuthbertson said. “We all got together and reviewed where we were. We aren’t ready to shoulder more cost in development activities.”
The bulk of the program budget came from NASA, which planned to devote more than $500 million to build a prototype engine by 2007 even after Boeing dropped out. But NASA chief Daniel S. Goldin said this week that the agency would use the money instead for the space station and other programs.
Some members of Congress reacted with outrage, saying that the loss of the project will allow the erosion of the nation’s position in the aeronautics industry.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), chairman of the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, lamented the billion-dollar expenditure on unproductive technology. “It is frivolous to build a jet engine that will let you go faster, but that has no practical use.”
Cuthbertson expressed hope that some of the advances made by the firms’ engineers, particularly in cockpit visibility, would be applied to military and commercial projects.
But Boeing also said it disbanded its international study group, a consortium of firms that had examined supersonic jet technology and related environmental issues.
Without the U.S. jet, the European-built Concorde remains the only supersonic jetliner. But the famed needle-nosed jet, flown by British Airways, is considered a commercial flop. The market for the 100-seat plane evaporated soon after Congress outlawed sonic booms over land in the 1970s.
The NASA-funded effort had envisioned a 300-foot-long vehicle that would fly at Mach 2.4 (2.4 times the speed of sound) and carry 300 passengers from Los Angeles to Tokyo in 4 hours and 20 minutes. Existing jets take about 10 hours to make the trip.
Industry studies cited as recently as 1997 indicated there would be a market for 1,000 to 1,500 of the aircraft.
“It looked like there was going to be a huge market in the Pacific Rim,” said Paul Looney, director of aeronautics policy for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the leading technological society for the industry. “Maybe the market is just not there yet.”
* BOEING, TRW TO LOSE PACTS: The Air Force is canceling contracts worth $832 million with Boeing and TRW. C1
