Boeing

PARIS -- At Yves Saint Laurent, the storied French design house that manufactures exclusively in Europe, the plunging value of the U.S. dollar has CEO Valerie Hermann thinking about the number of pockets on a skirt and the price of embroidery on a dress. Hermann is adamant that YSL must include in its ready-to-wear offerings cocktail dresses that don't cost more than 1,900 euros. "It's a crucial limit," she said. Six months ago, that was the equivalent of $2,565. Today, she'd have to sell the same garment for $215 more to make the same profit.

By May 2002, the government's effort to build a technologically audacious new generation of spy satellites was foundering. The contractor building the satellites, Boeing, was still giving Washington reassuring progress reports. But the program was threatening to outstrip its $5 billion budget, and pivotal parts of the design seemed increasingly unworkable. Peter B. Teets, the new head of the nation's spy satellite agency, appointed a panel of experts to examine the secret project, telling them, according to one member, "Find out what's going on; find the terrible truth I suspect is out there."

PARIS -- Airlines gave a major lift to the order book for the next generation Airbus A350 yesterday, announcing contracts for 114 of the planes on the first day of the Paris Air Show. The vote of confidence puts the late-to-the-gate program on more solid footing, although it is still well behind Boeing's rival jet. The A350 orders, worth more than $27 billion, were part of a total haul of 219 firm orders and 120 provisional ones - including 13 for the much-delayed A380 superjumbo - with a combined value of $45.7 billion at list prices.

Leaders of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers endorsed a contract proposal from Boeing Co. yesterday, greatly reducing the chances that its 44,000 members will strike on Thursday.After 12 days of intense negotiations at a hotel outside Seattle, Boeing submitted its final contract proposal to the machinists early yesterday, offering several concessions and a wage increase of nearly 16 percent over three years."We believe this contract is the best contract in aerospace, period," said Bill Johnson, a union negotiator who is also president of the Seattle local that represents 31,000 Boeing workers.

An excerpt from a Chicago Tribune editorial published on FridayON Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board, took the Federal Aviation Administration and the Boeing Co. to task for laxity in responding to indications that the world's most popular aircraft, Boeing's 737, has a fundamental flaw that has caused two fatal crashes.The key words in the NTSB report were "reliably redundant," i.e., there is no mechanical or procedural safety net in the event the 737's rudder fails.Boeing says it has begun correcting the flaw.

WASHINGTON -- Boeing Co. and four airlines are seeking an exemption from government rules so the company's 777 jet can fly farther from land. The purpose is to allow the plane, which has two engines, to fly across the Pacific even when emergency airfields along the route are closed by bad weather.The effort has created a dispute with Airbus, Boeing's only major competitor and a proponent of four-engine planes, as well as a re-evaluation by safety experts of whether it is still appropriate to set safety rules governing oceanic flights based on how many engines a plane has."

Take that, you brute, Saddam . . . uh, Slobodan. Keeping track of the enemy can be so confusing.This does not hurt us more than it hurts them. It hurts them more.Starr is the one who ought to be on trial, if you want to believe Susan McDougal. Or even if you don't.If the traveling public cannot trust a Boeing 737, what's left?Pub Date: 3/26/99

WASHINGTON -- A U.S. appeals court overturned a $1.2 billion damage award to Boeing Co. and General Dynamics Corp. yesterday and ordered a new set of hearings into the Navy's cancellation of a contract for the A-12 stealth attack aircraft.A three-judge panel in Washington unanimously ruled that a trial judge should not have awarded the damages -- the most ever against the U.S. government -- without first deciding whether company delays and cost overruns justified the Pentagon's decision to scrap the program.

SEATTLE -- Boeing Co., the world's biggest aircraft maker, said yesterday that it will cut as many as 7,000 jobs in St. Louis -- about 35 percent of the work force there -- as a result of dwindling orders for its F-15 fighter-bomber.Boeing also said for the first time that it will have to stop production of the Cold War-era fighter early next year, after it finishes delivering the F-15 to its customers, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Air Force.The cuts follow Greece's decision last month to pass over the pricier F-15 -- widely viewed as the world's most advanced air-to-air fighter -- for Lockheed Martin Corp.

WASHINGTON -- A detailed analysis of the voice and data recorders aboard EgyptAir 990 indicates that a crew member, possibly a relief pilot, seized the controls of the passenger jet and forced the plane into a steep dive toward the Atlantic Ocean, government officials said yesterday.Based on the new information, investigators theorize that the veteran captain of the Boeing 767, Ahmed el-Habashy, who had briefly left the cockpit and returned, struggled in vain to regain control of the aircraft after the other pilot calmly uttered an Arabic expression about putting his trust in God, switched off the autopilot and pitched the Boeing 767 into the high-speed plunge.

Boeing workers end strike after eight weeks SEATTLE : Factories at Boeing Co. were due to start humming again yesterday after Machinists union members voted to end a costly eight-week strike that clipped profits and stalled deliveries by the world's No. 2 commercial airplane maker. Workers were expected to return last night to Boeing's commercial airplane factories, which have been closed since the Sept. 6 walkout. The strike cost an estimated $100 million a day in deferred revenue and production delays on the company's highly anticipated next-generation passenger jet. Machinists union members ended their walkout Saturday by ratifying a new contract with Boeing.

In 1993, Defense Secretary Les Aspin invited more than a dozen CEOs of big weapons and aerospace companies to dinner at the Pentagon. In what has become known as the Last Supper, he shocked them by saying that, with the end of the Cold War, America had too many defense contractors and that the companies needed to merge or die. Merge they did. But 15 years later, as the fiasco with the Air Force's tanker contract and widespread Pentagon procurement dysfunction...

The Government Accountability Office has backed Boeing's protest of the awarding of a multibillion-dollar contract for refueling tankers to Northrop Grumman and a European partner, saying the Air Force made errors during the process. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, recommended yesterday that the Air Force reopen the bidding and obtain revised proposals. The $40 billion tanker program is the Air Force's No. 1 priority, intended to replace a fleet of aerial refueling tankers - which provide fuel to fighter jets and cargo planes in midair - that date back to the Eisenhower administration and which are being stressed in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If you want to feel like an astronaut, there is a company on the Space Coast that will take you up in a specially equipped Boeing aircraft and allow you to experience zero gravity. Zero G is headquartered in Las Vegas and provides flights at several locations, but what could be better than taking off from the shuttle runway at the Kennedy Space Center? Getting weightless isn't cheap. The price listed on the Zero G Web site is $3,950 plus tax for a 90-minute flight, so I guess I'll have to settle for getting partially weightless on the South Beach Diet.

Southwest Airlines, under fire for missing required safety checks, grounded 43 planes for immediate inspections yesterday after finding gaps in its maintenance records. The Dallas-based carrier said it pulled 38 of its older Boeing 737s from scheduled service, resulting in the cancellation of about 4 percent of its flights. Five of the grounded planes were in scheduled maintenance. Another had been retired. The airline said it was returning planes that were cleared to service and expected to complete the inspections by last night.

WASHINGTON -- Boeing Co. said yesterday that it would formally protest a $35 billion contract awarded by the Air Force to a team that would use a European plane to replace the aging fleet of U.S. aerial refueling tankers. "Our team has taken a very serious look at the tanker decision and found serious flaws in the process that we believe warrant appeal," W. James McNerney Jr., Boeing's chairman, president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. "This is an extraordinary step rarely taken by our company and one we take very seriously."

In a high-stakes rivalry pitting two of the world's largest defense contractors, Northrop Grumman Corp. gambled and won. The word came down Feb. 29 from the U.S. Air Force that a contract worth up to $40 billion for aerial refueling tankers would go to Northrop and its partner, Airbus, a unit of Netherlands-based European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. Shut out was rival Boeing Co., which thought it had a winner. It was a decision likened to last month's stunning Super Bowl loss by the heavily favored New England Patriots, with the favorite losing a cliffhanger.

WASHINGTON -- A European aerospace consortium and the Northrop Grumman Corp. won yesterday a $30 billion to $40 billion contract to begin replacing the Air Force's aging fleet of aerial tankers. The decision to use an airplane built in Europe was a stunning setback for the Boeing Co. and it ignited an instant outcry on Capitol Hill. Chicago-based Boeing, which has built the Air Force's tankers for the past half-century, gave no indication whether it would appeal the award but said it was exploring its options.

Boeing Co., noting unresolved production problems, said yesterday that it will not be able to deliver its first 787 Dreamliner passenger jet until early 2009 - more than nine months later than it had promised airlines. The latest holdup marked another embarrassing setback for Boeing, which had insisted as recently as last month that there would be no further delays after pushing back the plane's delivery by six months in October. In a conference call with analysts yesterday, Boeing officials said they didn't expect the delay to have a "significant" effect on 2008 earnings, though they were still assessing how it would affect earnings in 2009, the first year the company would have to pay penalty fees to airlines.

PARIS -- At Yves Saint Laurent, the storied French design house that manufactures exclusively in Europe, the plunging value of the U.S. dollar has CEO Valerie Hermann thinking about the number of pockets on a skirt and the price of embroidery on a dress. Hermann is adamant that YSL must include in its ready-to-wear offerings cocktail dresses that don't cost more than 1,900 euros. "It's a crucial limit," she said. Six months ago, that was the equivalent of $2,565. Today, she'd have to sell the same garment for $215 more to make the same profit.