Those who miss the civilized seven across main cabin seating on the once widely used Boeing 767 jets might take some encouragement from a graphic circulated by ‘wealth managers’ Merrill Lynch and Flightglobal this last week. It shows an apparent return of that popular seating plan. It seems like, and may even be, a sign […]

Those who miss the civilized seven across main cabin seating on the once widely used Boeing 767 jets might take some encouragement from a graphic circulated by ‘wealth managers’ Merrill Lynch and Flightglobal this last week.

It shows an apparent return of that popular seating plan. It seems like, and may even be, a sign of hope for an escape from the disaster that is nine across tight fit seating in the 787 Dreamliners, or the increasingly ‘optimized’ high compression misery of single aisle 737s and A320s, with their unusable dinky little toilets and painfully arranged seats in configurations never envisaged when these jets first appeared.

An earlier base line diagram of the design (below) was shown off by Boeing at the Paris Air Show earlier this year.

The jet project referred to in the finance house report and the most widely circulated aviation publication has also morphed in recent weeks into the 7M7 rather than the Boeing MoM, or middle of market concept.Those of legal driving age may recall that the Dreamliner was originally the 7E7, before the E became an 8, and the 7J7 was the end of 80’s unducted fan design to replace the 727 and kill the A320 at birth.

The 727 died of natural causes instead, the A320 survived birth and thrived, and 7J7, because of a number of awkward risks with unducted fans, like cutting the tail off in an engine failure, never flew on earth.

Which makes the very existence of diagrams of a 7M7 enormously topical. Merrill Lynch doesn’t design airliners, it flogs stock, and consummately good advice of course, so that diagram isn’t a doodle off the screen of an apprentice master of the universe on Wall Street.

It’s a leak, although to what end is of some interest. These days the merest suggestion that Airbus or Boeing is about to launch a fabulous all new airliner is the sort of thing likely to cause today’s sissy investors to rush for the exits and sell the vision down to the status of a penny dreadful .

The heroic age of aircraft maker investors reached its zenith sometime in the decades following the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 before most readers were born. Such optimism has had the bejaysus kicked out of it since then, with the last hurrah possibly being the Dreamliner when thousands of them were going to flood into service no later than mid 2008!

What aircraft maker investors want to hear from A and B these days is that they are selling thousands of single aisle jets smartened up with new super duper high tech engines in which 99.99 percent of the costs have long ago been written off and ever single sale shovels millions of anything into the accounts.

Which is what has been happening, but more for Airbus than Boeing. The American purveyor of fine single aisle jets has ‘a problem’ at the upper end of the passenger knee pain threshold for single aisle jets, which is around 250 seats, where the A321 NEO, the largest of its new engine tech A320 family, appears to be all conquering, leading Boeing to declare that the market is really all about the 200 seat limit, where it is pushing its 737 MAX 200 variant with considerable success.

That problem isn’t of course directly recognized. The 7M7, like the MoM was really about, wink, nudge, something bigger than a piddling A321 or the now obsolescent 757 series. And it will be further differentiated from the 737 MAXs and A320 NEOs by being wide bodied. Or as Flightglobal discusses in its excellent subscription required article, an oval rather than circular shaped ‘small’ widebody.

Ovalising a pressure vessel like an aircraft fuselage is something that composite materials are widely said to handle better than metal alloys, although it isn’t quite clear that a 7M7 will be a high composite advance on the 787, which may have just, heck, been a tad premature in going so enthusiastically down that route.

Metal alloys have in parallel also advanced in recent years, so Airbus and Boeing and their impatient junior competitors in China and Russia do have some technical choices to consider when it comes to manufacturing the new 250-300 seat airliners of the next two decades.

But back to the question of passenger comfort. The diagrammatic display of seven across economy seating doesn’t necessarily means those seats will be as opulently wide as they were in the 767. If a 797, oops, 7M7 has seven across seats as cruel in their minimization, oops, optimization as they are in nine across 787, we’re stuffed, literally.

Is there a market for the 7M7? The answer has to be Yes, and it has to include many of the 737 MAX and A321 NEO sales that might have originally been seen as deliverable in the late 2020s and 2030s. Why? Because there just isn’t going to be enough tarmac, at the gates, nor space in the skies, for all of the growth projected in single aisle sales to be accommodated unless something radical is done about air traffic control technology, beyond all the guff that has been talked about that without meaningful improvements, since late in the last century.

The Airbus and Boeing market outlooks for single aisle jets have in parallel shifted the average size of those jets upwards every year for the last ten. That is, the proportion of that projected demand that is heading for the 250 seat mark keeps rising.

There is no reason why it will stop at 250 seats, yet that is about where single aisle cabin geometry consistent with the efficient turning of such jets in 30 minutes between flights comes to an end.

Which points to a future where Airbus and Boeing will have to migrate the upper end of demand for their single aisle jets to ‘fatter’ wider concepts able to fit more passengers above every sets of wheels and wings parked at the terminals used by those 737s and A320s today. (Many gates used by these jets today are large enough for 767s, yet too small for A330s and 777s.)

This need is more urgent for Boeing than Airbus, since it isn’t competing at all well with the A321 NEO. But the need can’t be solved overnight, new design programs take more than five years, more like 7-10 years to bring to market depending on the amount of innovation required to deliver a marketable improvement in efficiency.

The danger for Boeing is that it needs to go first, while Airbus can then decide to go ‘best’, some years later, when the material structural choices may be clearer.

The vital issue for mere passengers is that the jet makers need to realise that people have become larger, not smaller, and need toilets in which the essential requirements of hygiene can be handled.

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