preview

Boeing 767

Better Essays

Harvard Business School 9-688-040 Rev. April 1, 1991 The Boeing 767: From Concept to Production (A) In August 1981, eleven months before the first scheduled delivery of Boeing’s new airplane, the 767, Dean Thornton, the program’s vice president-general manager, faced a critical decision. For several years, Boeing had lobbied the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for permission to build wide-bodied aircraft with two-, rather than three-person cockpits. Permission had been granted late in July. Unfortunately, the 767 had originally been designed with a three-person cockpit, and 30 of those planes were already in various stages of production. Thornton knew that the planes had to be converted to models with two-person cockpits. But …show more content…

Buyers—primarily the 50 leading airlines around the world—used that knowledge to enhance their bargaining positions, often delaying orders until the last possible moment. Negotiations on price, design modifications, and after-sales parts and service became especially aggressive in the 1970s, when airlines that had been making steady profits began losing large sums of money. Cost savings became a dominant concern. As Richard Ferris, the CEO of United Airlines, remarked: “Don’t bug me about interior design or customer preference, just guarantee the seat-mile performance.”3 The Boeing Company Boeing was the sales leader of the airframe industry, as well as one of America’s leading exporters. It had built more commercial airplanes than any other company in the world. Sales in 1981 were $9.2 billion; of the total, $5.1 billion were ascribed to the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company, the firm’s aircraft manufacturing division. Other divisions produced missiles, rockets, helicopters, space equipment, computers and electronics. History The Boeing Company was founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing, the son of a wealthy timber man who had studied engineering at Yale. In its earliest days, the company built military aircraft for use in World War I. It began to prosper in the 1920s and 1930s, when the civil aviation market expanded, primarily because of the demand for mail carrying. At about that time, William Boeing issued a challenge

Get Access