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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Six months after slicing production of the iconic Boeing 747 to just one plane a month, the aerospace company has decided to halve the rate of production and flagged it is close to killing off the plane.
A new Form 10-Q filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission spells out the ugly situation as “Lower-than-expected demand for large commercial passenger and freighter aircraft and slower-than-expected growth of global freight traffic have continued to drive market uncertainties, pricing pressures and fewer orders than anticipated.”
Boeing has therefore “canceled previous plans to return to a production rate of 1.0 aircraft per month beginning in 2019.”
The company still has “32 undelivered aircraft” on its books, some yet to be built. But it also has “a number of completed aircraft in inventory” for which buyers cannot be found.
Production of the 747 will therefore been reduced just six planes a year as of September 2016 and the filing makes it plain that Boeing knows it may soon have a difficult decision to make.
“If we are unable to obtain sufficient orders and/or market, production and other risks cannot be mitigated,” the filing says, “we could record additional losses that may be material, and it is reasonably possible that we could decide to end production of the 747.”
The 747 remains a fine aircraft, but twin-engine planes can now match it for capacity and, crucially, for long flights over areas where airports are scarce.
(Score: 4, Informative) by deadstick on Saturday July 30 2016, @02:34PM
A bit of conflation going on here. The barrel roll incident was on the public demo flight of the 707 in 1955; the 747 entered production in 1969; and the "last person out" story came during the downturn of 1971. The sobriquet "Aluminum Overcast" has been attached to any number of large aircraft over the years; today it's most closely associated with a B-17 that tours the country selling $500 rides.
Fun fact: It's widely believed that the name 707 refers to the cosine of the wing sweep angle, but that's wrong: the angle is actually 35 degrees, not 45.