Unfortunately, with COVID-19 causing air travel demand to plummet, these cuts are needed to meet demand. Farewell to the 747 after over 50 years of production.
In all fairness 747 production was probably gonna end in 2022 regardless. Unless a few more cargo orders tricked in it wasn’t going to have any to make after 2022. 787 and 777 production slow downs were also probably pretty inevitable since both were well past there backlog and were just maintaining new orders so to speak. Besides that really isn’t bad news, it’s pretty normal for any airliner to get the bulk of its orders in the first few years and be produced furiously till that is cleared then slow down, and in the 777s case continue to slow down as fewer orders are coming in late in the types life span. All be it thanks to COVID those slow downs are lever than usual. 777X even two was probably already gonna fall behind because of already mounting delays, and the company focusing on the 73M. I can’t deny that coronavirus has a part to play in all of these, but they were all probably inevitable.
Interestingly, there were no “abnormal” items in the total loss. They recorded an additional ~500 million in expected future payments to 737 MAX but did not record additional charges to the 737 MAX and 787 programs as a result of COVID-19.
As the 777X comes online and starts incurring its own deferred production costs, Boeing is going to have to take a long hard look at their deferred production/tooling costs (currently totalling ~23.28 Billion across the MAX, 787, and 777X) and see if they can actually make that money back.
Given that Long-haul travel is not projected to recover until 2024 and a long-haul aircraft product lifecycle of around 20 years, Boeing may have to take a charge on those amounts soon.
