FARNBOROUGH, England — Tim Clark, who runs Gulf carrier Emirates and is an essential and exacting customer of both Airbus and Boeing, is waiting for delivery of more than 200 giant 777Xs with both optimism and worry.
He doesn’t expect to get the first ones until mid-2026, he said in an interview at the Farnborough Air Show. He knows Boeing has a difficult time ahead to fix its manufacturing problems.
And he believes Boeing management needs the company’s front-line workers and their union on its side to get the job done.
“The guys on the shop floor, the engineers, the machinists, they know what to do,” said Clark. “They can get it sorted.”
“Don’t forget the workforce. Make sure they get a good deal. Make sure that you look after them,” he added. “Make sure you recognize the criticality of what they do.”
If that makes Clark sound like a socialist, he’s not. A 74-year-old Englishman, he runs one of the richest airlines in the world from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
He does believe in Boeing’s legacy of engineering and manufacturing prowess, and he wants it restored because he needs it for his business.
Emirates has a giant fleet of 271 big commercial jets, including 118 Airbus superjumbo A380s, and more than 140 Boeing 777s.
The A380 is discontinued after it failed to make money for Airbus. So Clark needs the 777X to renew his fleet. He has placed almost half the total orders for the jet.
He described the Puget Sound region as “the cradle, the crucible,” of Boeing and the workers there as capable of pulling the company from the pit it has fallen into.
“It’s fixable, very fixable,” Clark said.
If the promise of the 777X design is followed through and the plane built well, it will be a triumph; if Boeing delivers the airlines what they need, it will come through, he said.
He said that in the end it will be the union machinists who implement the fixes for Boeing’s quality problems.
“If you’ve got unions that want to contribute and help resolve the problem, which in the end looks after their future as well as the company, that’s where you should go,” he said.
He even offered support for the Machinists union demand in the ongoing contract negotiations for a seat on Boeing’s board.
He said he wouldn’t support predatory behavior by unions seeking to take advantage when a business is in trouble, but “if they’re coming in on a contributory basis, I think it’s not a bad idea.”
Still, however Boeing gets fixed, Clark said it will take time.
“You have to slow, to restart, to get to production levels you want to,” he said. “It’s just a question of how long that’s going to take.”
Boeing has slowed production on the Max and the 787. It faces supply chain bottlenecks due to labor shortages at suppliers.
Knowing the problems and the backlog of delayed jets, Clark was skeptical of the delivery schedule mentioned in a big order announced by Korean Air on Monday, the opening day of the Air Show.
That order, for 20 Boeing 787 Dreamliners and 20 of the first passenger model of the 777X, the 777-9X, is worth about $7.3 billion after standard discounts, according to pricing data from aircraft valuation firm Avitas.
In a news conference, Korean Air Chair and CEO Walter Cho said his first 777X would be delivered in 2028.
Clark said he doesn’t know how Boeing can promise a new customer delivery in 2028 because the original set of blue-ribbon airlines that ordered the plane in 2013 need to get their nearly 400 jets first.
Clark said he thinks Boeing could ramp up production to only about five jets a month by the end of 2027 or early 2028. Korean may have to wait, he concluded.
At the order announcement, Cho seemed appreciative of Boeing, yet just a little wary of its current state. He spoke of Boeing as a partner over 50 years that had supported the airline during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The 777 was the benchmark that held us successful through those three years,” he said. The 777’s efficiency as a cargo plane carried many airlines through the pandemic.
Yet Cho has also ordered the smaller but competing A350-1000 jet from Airbus. Asked which of the two would be Korean Air’s flagship plane, he alluded to the possibility of delays as he replied “whichever comes first will be our flagship.”
Following that seeming hesitation in belief, Cho then expressed confidence in Boeing.
“If not confident, I would not have ordered it,” he said. “Boeing will pull through whatever they are going through right now.”
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