Sky Wars Continues: Boeing Launches 747-8 Aircraft

Nov. 15, 2005

The battle between Chicago-based Boeing Co. and Toulouse, France-based Airbus SAS for dominance of the commercial aircraft skies just got more intense. With orders from Cargolux and Nippon Cargo Airlines, Boeing this week expanded its 747 family by adding intercontinental passenger jets and freighters, dubbed 747-8, that borrow advanced technologies from Boeing's twin-jet 787 passenger aircraft that's slated to go into service in 2008.

Those technologies will "significantly increase the passenger and freight capabilities of the 747 and offer greater fuel efficiency, improved operating economics and be more friendly to the environment with reduced noise and emissions," said Alan Mulally, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

The first 747-8 freighter is scheduled for delivery to Cargolux in the third quarter of 2009; Nippon Cargo is slated to receive its first freighter in the fourth quarter of 2009.

The 747-8 passenger airplane, a stretched version of today's 747-400, will be the only jetliner in the 400-seat to 500-seat market, Boeing claims. Airbus' A380, now being flight tested, is designed to for 550 (and more) seats. Compared to the A380 freighter version, the 747-8 freighter will have 20% lower trip costs, Boeing claims.

Both the passenger and freighter versions of the four-engine 747-8 will be powered by General Electric Co. GEnx engines, which were developed for the Boeing 787.

The 747-8 is the first airplane launch for Boeing since W. James McNerney became Boeing chairman and CEO on July 1, 2005.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.