Boeing's decision to put the MD-11 out of its misery has once again raised the question of its true intentions for Long Beach and the Douglas Products division.

In a few short months it has announced the closure of the MD-80 and MD-90 lines, transferred key engineering and management staff to Seattle and now seems to be delivering the coup de grace by axeing the widebody programme.

The latest decision effectively means that, by early 2000, the Long Beach assembly lines will have only the 717 (formerly the MD-95) to carry on the Douglas civil aircraft tradition, if not the name.

The harsh reality is that, whatever the hopes and fears of the team at Douglas, its product line was never the main event. Boeing's strategic objective for acquiring McDonnell Douglas clearly lay in the glittering prize of its combat aircraft expertise. Douglas may once have been a formidable power in the aviation world, but a rich heritage and huge installed base are simply not enough - as Fokker, Saab and others have discovered.

The decision on the Douglas narrowbodies hardly needed a second thought. Not only did they conflict with Boeing's existing products, but the programmes were fast running out of steam. The MD-80 had virtually run out of orders, leaving the MD-90 to soldier on alone.

The fact that the MD-11 programme, with fewer than 20 orders, was not itself axed immediately always looked less like a long term commitment than political expediency - giving a hopeful message to the workers at Long Beach and treading carefully around the sensibilities of the powerful state of California, which has fought to keep local jobs.

Boeing's decision to allow the MD-11 to linger on as a freighter programme never appeared to be a strong long-term strategy, and was possibly adopted more in hope than expectation. Despite enthusiastic market forecasts, no aircraft programme has ever survived long in production on freighter sales alone. Airlines requiring a widebody freighter below the 747 have not had to look far for secondhand passenger aircraft to convert, including the MD-11's predecessor, the DC-10. A stream of older MD-11s is also pouring on to the market, with fears over the programme's future helping to accelerate their withdrawal from passenger service.

In truth, the death warrant for the MD-11 had been signed well before Boeing entered the scene. Its lingering demise can be traced back seven years, to the ill-fated Singapore Airlines order, when MDC's failure to deliver on promised performance led to the deal being cancelled. The MD-11 has continued to lose out to the newer technology coming out of Seattle and Toulouse.

MDC had more or less conceded its defeat in the widebody market before talks began with Boeing. Efforts to find investors (including talks with Taiwan) for proposed larger and longer range derivatives came to naught and plans were dropped, confirming the MD-11 as an orphan.

The question is now what will happen to the 717, Long Beach's remaining occupant alongside the military C-17 transporter? Boeing has put its full marketing weight behind the aircraft, with forecasts of massive demand, but, notably, the number of cast iron orders is scarce indeed.

If there are some good reasons to keep this relatively modest programme alive, then they are likely to rest more with corporate strategy in Seattle than with the product at Long Beach. Perhaps the strongest of them is to give Boeing a ready-made 100-seat aircraft with which to taunt Airbus Industrie. The consortium has already been prompted to rush into studies on the A319M5, further complicating its delicate relations with China, with which it has promised to build the AE31X.

It was Boeing's failure to get its own Chinese project off the ground that opened the way for the AE31X. With that now having stalled, Boeing could consider returning with its new 100-seater. It is worth remembering that the MD-95 was conceived for assembly in China following MDC's lacklustre TrunkLiner effort.

All of this begs the question: what is left for Long Beach? Although there has been talk of a second 737 line or similar, the realistic reply is it will not emerge so much as an equal to Seattle, but as a supplier, more like Wichita than Renton.

Source: Flight International