Up, Up and Away

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As millions of air travelers embark on holiday flights this week, some of them will be flying on jetliners fresh off the assembly line. And in the near future more and more passengers will be boarding shiny new planes, because the three big commercial-aircraft builders -- Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Europe's Airbus -- have been enjoying a Christmas-style sales rush all year long. Airlines around the world, spurred by growing passenger volume and the need to replace hundreds of aging 1960s-era jets, have embarked on an unprecedented shopping spree, ordering more than 976 new jets worth a record $43 billion so far in 1988.

For passengers, the buying binge will mean bigger, quieter and more comfortable planes. Airlines, for their part, will save on operating costs with the new fuel-efficient jets, which feature advanced computerized flight systems. With so many airplanes to build, though, the booming aerospace companies will face some fresh concerns: how to meet their delivery schedules and still ensure that their quality control does not slip.

The backlog of airliner orders already totals 1,102 at Boeing, 555 at Airbus and 320 at Douglas. A carrier that orders a jet today will have to wait as long as three years for delivery. Phoenix-based America West Airlines, which ordered 25 Boeing 737s and 757s last week, will take delivery of the first one in 1992. The jet-building boom may well last a decade or more. One Douglas study estimates that 2,500 commercial airliners -- 40% of the world's commercial-jet fleet of 6,200 planes -- will be retired during the next 15 $ years.

Air carriers need the planes to keep up with worldwide passenger travel, which is growing some 7% a year and backing up taxiways at airports from Hong Kong to Dallas. To cope with the crowding, carriers are buying larger aircraft, reducing the number of individual flights. A new midrange Boeing 767, which carries as many as 260 travelers, can replace two smaller 727s or Douglas DC-9s.

At the same time, airlines have increased their vigilance against the danger of overstressed, older planes since an incident last April, when the fuselage of a 1969-vintage Aloha Airlines 737 peeled open at 24,000 ft. The average age of the 5,253 planes in the U.S. fleet is 14 years; some 43% of jets were built more than 20 years ago. Another shopping incentive for U.S. carriers: tighter noise regulations. The newest jets are as much as 30% quieter than their predecessors.

The resulting frenzy of plane ordering this year should bring a long-running bonanza for all three airliner builders:

BOEING. Nearly every day, a silvery aluminum-skinned Boeing airliner rolls out of one of the company's four giant hangars in suburban Seattle and is sprayed with the colors of its new owner: red and blue for American, yellow and blue for Lufthansa, emerald green for Aer Lingus. The world's largest aircraft manufacturer (a record $29 billion in orders this year, up from $20 billion in 1987) is stepping up production, from 25 jetliners a month to 32.