Boeing CEO David Calhoun explicitly erased any notion that the company will launch the development of a new commercial airplane this decade during the company’s 2022 Investor Conference Wednesday, explaining that it needs to see the availability of technology capable of generating a 20- to 30 percent operating cost improvement over existing platforms before committing financial resources to any clean-sheet program. Calhoun stressed the need instead to concentrate on achieving “strict compliance” with quality standards and “normalizing” cash flow to about $10 billion by 2025 or 2026, a target he characterized as eminently achievable now that the company has mitigated what he called the existential risks it has faced since the grounding of the 737 Max in March 2019.
“I don't want to fill a gap in a product line. I want to build a product that's going to differentiate in a way that absolutely substitutes the airplanes that came before it,” said Calhoun. “That number has to be at least 20, 25, maybe 30 percent better than airplanes it replaces. And there are technologies and concepts that go with that and underlying ways of building it that can get you to that answer. And they all take time and they all have to be proven.”
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