Aerospace industry sales may top $200 billion this year, according to John Douglass, the outgoing Aerospace Industries Association president and CEO.
That would be a roughly 9 percent advance from last year. Douglass announced last December in his annual industry review and forecast that total 2006 deliveries were estimated at $184 billion, up from a robust $170 billion in 2005, according to AIA numbers.
If industry sales reach $200 billion this year, that would beat Douglass’s forecast last December, when he saw deliveries of $195.4 billion this year.
“Sales could very well go over $200 billion,” said Douglass, who is resigning from the AIA leadership post he has held for years. He is in discussions with several potential new employers, he said, but nothing final has been decided.
If sales reach $200 billion this year, Douglass said, that would be a tenfold increase from the $20 billion when Douglass began his career life in 1963, he said.
Over those years, he noted, the industry has been transformed markedly, shifting from 85 percent sales going to the military. Now, 74 percent of sales are to commercial customers, with just one-fourth of sales to space and defense buyers.
In a media briefing at AIA headquarters, Douglass made several other points:
- The United States is slipping badly in supporting its space program, and needs to increase funding by a wide margin. “We cannot go back to the moon on the kind of” money being provided in NASA budgets, he said.
- The aerospace industry workforce is rife with people in their 50s who are heading for retirement, meaning that replacements must be found now to learn the trade. The FAA, Department of Defense (DoD), Department of Transportation and other agencies are in the same position, he noted.
- Streamlined export regulations recently created for shipments to the United Kingdom are a good step.
- The space shuttle fleet is being retired in 2010 because the creaky craft are unsafe, not to save money, and astronauts’ lives shouldn’t be risked by extending shuttle operations beyond that deadline.
- DoD procurement programs staffing needs to be beefed up, and changes must be made in federal nomination procedures for senior-level positions. Also, pay levels for senior positions should be raised, because many skilled people can’t afford to take government jobs when private sector jobs pay so much more.
- There are many protests of DoD contract awards for military hardware because requests for proposals are in many instances poorly written, not because contractors are desperate to win contracts because there is so little new work.
- The low point in DoD acquisitions had to be when an Air Force procurement official, Darleen Druyun, negotiated a tanker-planes lease-purchase deal with a contractor while at the same time negotiating with the contractor to get a job with the firm. The $23.5 billion deal later was canceled.