Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [10]
As most of the aerospace world watched the battle of the titans play out between the A380 and the 747X, an international patent application was quietly filed on January 19, 2001, by two of the Boeing engineers behind project Glacier. Filed by Chester Nelson and Gerhard Seidel, it was couched in the cold, formal language of the patent office as “an integrated and/or modular high-speed aircraft and method of design.” However, the small sketch accompanying the filing told a far more exciting story—a dramatic, curvaceous aircraft configured with canards and a delta wing and capable of a “supersonic or near-sonic cruise Mach number.”
It would soon become known to the world as the Sonic Cruiser—a design that would catch everyone’s attention and imagination. The stunning looks of the Glacier, and the fact that analysis indicated that 15 to 20 percent greater speeds could be obtained at costs equal to the present 767, were compelling enough for studies to be taken further.
To some it had the feel of a potential game changer. “When I first saw it I was immediately enamored. I thought ‘wow, that really looks cool’, and we just felt it was worth a look,” said Roundhill. “So we started down the path of the Sonic Cruiser—though we didn’t call it that at the time. Meanwhile, we continued in parallel with a second phase of Yellowstone, and we had all the enthusiasm from Phantom Works to participate,” added Jackson.
It didn’t take long for news of it to leak out, and two days after the patent filing, an article in the Wall Street Journal gave the first to hint that Boeing’s plans included a two-hundred-to-three-hundred-seat aircraft capable of transonic speeds, cruising at Mach 0.95. As these plans were supposedly guarded within the innermost sanctums of Boeing’s product development group, it was with some shock and dismay that the company began seeing details leaked to the press before it could even start to brief all its customers.
Condit decided it was time to formally reveal the existence of “Project 20XX” and the associated middle market studies without giving anything away on Glacier. During a press conference to announce the financial results for 2000, Condit hinted that “a new middle market aircraft” was going to be the new focus for product development and that the company was “going to look at where the market is.”
From now on developments moved at sonic speed. With Condit’s encouragement, Mulally, Roundhill, and Bair spent a good chunk of March touring airlines in one of the Boeing corporate Challenger jets, showing astonished executives a small concept model of Glacier. “We also looked at how a fast aircraft would fit in with their fleets, and we hired fleet planners from the airlines. That wasn’t difficult: there were a lot of them available in those days,” Roundhill remembered.
The news, or lack of it, fueled the belief in some quarters that the Sonic Cruiser was some kind of publicity stunt—a deliberate response to Airbus and its massive A380 public-relations campaign throughout 2000 and early 2001. Nothing could have been farther from the truth, as Bair later recalled. “If we had been given a choice, we would not have said anything about the Sonic Cruiser until we were ready. It was still a product-development study, but enough information came out about it that it was impossible to keep it quiet.”
NEW DIRECTIONS
Finally, at a press conference on March 29, 2001, Boeing announced it was shelving plans to develop the 747X and was instead turning its attention to the far more exotic-sounding Sonic Cruiser. The initial studies of the novel-looking aircraft were