Airline cuts hit aerospace shares

Boeing, Precision Castparts and Goodrich fell sharply Friday, pulling down the Standard & Poor's 500 Aerospace & Defense index the most for a week since 2003 as U.S. airlines cut capacity and crude-oil prices surged.

The S&P index dropped 8 percent this week. Boeing fell 12 percent in five days, the most since April 2002. On Friday, Boeing — one of the 30 Dow Jones industrial stocks — tumbled $4.15 to close at $73.16 on a day the Dow fell nearly 400 points. Precision Castparts and Goodrich both lost 14 percent this week.

U.S. carriers including American Airlines and United Airlines have said they'll ground more than 220 planes and slash at least 7,600 jobs to cope with fuel costs and a slump in demand. The measures amount to capacity cuts of 8 percent to 12 percent and need to go further, which will hurt planemakers and suppliers, an analyst said.

"Twenty-percent-capacity cuts are needed across the board, implying that there is quite a bit more to come," Joseph Nadol of JPMorgan Securities wrote in a note Friday. "Widespread capacity reductions are a terrible sign for the cycle."

Airplane production will probably be cut as of the second half of 2010, even amid a record order backlog now, Nadol wrote. Traffic growth is slowing around the world as carriers outside the U.S. also begin to "feel the pain" of higher oil prices and raise fares, he wrote.

Boeing "faces deterioration in outlook for its key commercial aircraft division, which we think has continued to be the major driver of the stock," Rob Stallard, an analyst with Macquarie Research in New York, wrote in a June 4 note.

Precision Castparts, the Portland-based maker of metal forgings for jet engines, fell $6.58, or 6 percent, to $104 on Friday. Goodrich dropped $1.86, or 3.2 percent, to $55.89. The company is the world's largest maker of landing gear.

United Technologies — maker of Pratt & Whitney jet engines, Hamilton Sundstrand aerospace equipment and Sikorsky helicopters — declined $2.96, or 4.2 percent, to $67.01.