Danny Westneat / Times staff columnist
New Boeing modeled on Wal-Mart?

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As we are all painfully aware, Boeing is suffering an identity crisis.

Once it was as dominant and arrogant as Microsoft.

Recently it has been a 1980s IBM — humiliated, schizophrenic about how to regain its glory.

Now the big question is: What is Boeing's new identity?

In the latest Aerospace Industries Association newsletter, Alan Mulally, CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, hints at the answer:

"As a maturing industry, it serves us well to recognize that no longer is our destiny determined by our success in going faster, higher, farther," he writes, "but more so by a compelling need to continuously improve our efficiency and competitiveness."

Inventing new machines that fly faster, higher and farther is out. Building cheaper versions of the old machines is in. Meet the new Boeing: the Wal-Mart of the skies.

Now Mulally is not some company Eeyore who spouts worst-case scenarios. He's known as Boeing's optimist.

But this vision is depressing — especially so because many aerospace experts and economists believe it to be true.

The argument goes that airplane technology is butting against the limits of physics. Fly faster and you incur exorbitant fuel costs. There's no point in flying much farther, as planes now can go nearly halfway around the world.
 
You can try to make planes bigger, as Airbus is doing. Or improve fuel efficiency, as Boeing is attempting with the 7E7.

Beyond tweaking what we have now, though, we're done. The new challenge is how to build these complex machines for less money.

I'm no aerospace expert. But it seems shortsighted to assume we are flying as fast, as high and as far as we'll ever go. Or that there's no profit to be made in pushing the boundaries. Or that we can't invent a new world-altering device, as Boeing did with its 747.

Like the "blended wing" plane, the giant wing with engines that theoretically could carry far more people for dramatically less fuel. Have we given up on that?

How about super- or hypersonic travel? Or a plane fueled by hydrogen instead of oil?

At the least, a company motto of "been there, done that" seems bad for morale. It tells aviation engineers — once so cool they were featured in local beer commercials — that they are a dying species.

Even car-industry CEOs wax about a smog-free future in which fuel cells propel us hundreds of miles for pennies.

It's not that Boeing has abandoned all exploration. Company engineers helped make the 12-foot plane that three weeks ago flew 5,000 mph.

Yet compare Mulally's words to this:

"I've tried to make the men around me feel, as I do, that we are embarked as pioneers upon a new science and industry in which our problems are so new and unusual that it behooves no one to dismiss any novel idea with the statement that 'it can't be done.' "

Bill Boeing said that — granted, only 26 years after the first flight. But I bet the future will show his words apply now as much as they did then.

I do wonder if his company will be around to find out.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.

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