Jetrader - July/August 2012 - 9

Q&A

Joe Ozimek
ISTAT’s president and new Boeing 737 MAX program marketing leader
When he’s not wielding his ISTAT gavel, current president Joe Ozimek handles his new assignment as Boeing’s primary contact for customers for its new 737 MAX program launched in mid-2011. Jetrader caught up with Ozimek on the road for an update on the airplane’s progress. Q: Since coming aboard as the 737 MAX customer marketing leader in early 2012, you’ve been traveling a lot of late. How’s your new work life going? A: It’s very interesting. Right now I’m at about a month on the road. So far it’s been Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, ﬁve cities in China, New York and London. It’s the only way to gauge where our customers are on their thinking about the airplane. It always helps to take their temperature, and personally I think face-to-face meetings are the best way to do that. If you really want to know what’s going on in the airplane world, you have to go out and meet with your customers. Q: Where is the 737 MAX program in its life to date? A: We’re in the process of talking with customers about what it is that they need from a payload range standpoint. In general, we’re out to hear what extraordinary requirements customers might have that we need to incorporate into the airplane or not. We’re making great progress, and the MAX program has a good team of people. We’re certainly applied in our focus on delivering the airplane on time. Q: Why did Boeing call the new 737 by the name MAX? What are you telling the customer MAX means? A: MAX is maximum fuel efficiency, maximum seat-mile cost savings for the customer, maximum customer experience from the new Boeing Sky Interior of the plane. It’s a lot of maximum things that either the customer, or the customer’s customer, would experience in the airplane. Q: Why did Boeing go with the MAX as opposed to a totally new airplane to meet the single-aisle replacement market as many people thought was Boeing’s direction? A: There are a few reasons for that. First, we were studying a new airplane but it’s very difﬁcult to replace today’s single-aisle airplane, with from 150 to 200 seats, with an all-brand-new airplane. There was difﬁculty in closing the cost/price loop, since a new airplane would be rather sophisticated from a systems standpoint, and from the standpoint of materials, certainly if you’re talking about an all-composite plane. Rate was also a challenge. We were somewhat challenged in understanding a plan of how we could build get up to these rates with composite airplanes. The combination of factors including closing the cost-price loop and the production rate challenge got us thinking that the proper solution was a new engine variant. Q: Boeing was criticized by some in the industry for waiting as long as it did to announce the re-engining. What is the difference in Boeing’s approach as opposed to the Airbus NEO solution? A: Airbus is offering an airplane with a similar engine to ours with similar size and efﬁciency gains, and they’re removing their tip fences and putting winglets on the airplane for what they are proposing as an improvement of between 12-15 percent. I think it’s important to remember that we have been continuously improving the NG since we introduced it to service, so we’ve already done things like putting winglets on the plane. We’ve put on carbon brakes and GE has introduced tech insertions into the airplane, so we’ve improved the airplane by about 6 percent, and we intend to improve it another 13 percent. If you add what Airbus has done between its engine choice and the airframe, that’s somewhere between 12 and 15 percent. If you take all the changes we’ve

Joe Ozimek

Jetrader 9

http://www.naylornetwork.com/ist-nxt

Jetrader - July/August 2012

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