I dont really agree with your assertion that Boeing is unable to fund future development - they have a big bucket of cash, they appear to have no trouble borrowing, and they have profitable military programs. They should be able to fund a new narrow body jet with ease. Heck, a modernized 757 would be fairly cheap to design/build and its effectively still a pretty modern airframe too.
No, and that's the point. The 757 is already a more capable airframe, for a start, and there's a lot more leeway for the same kinds of modernizations applied to the 737 before getting in trouble. Obvious example, more room under the wings, so you can use newer, larger, more quiet and efficient engines without running out of space and having to resort to the kind of CG-shifting "put the engine in front of the wing" hack that necessitated MCAS and doomed the MAX.
You're still talking about modernizing a 40 year old design....by a company that fucked up a modernisation spectacularly.
>hack that necessitated MCAS and doomed the MAX.
The issue is not that the airframe required it but that the corporate culture looked at this issue and concluded lets do it. Lets do it DESPITE the problems...that's the company you've got leading the modernization of the 757 you propose.
Boeing will pull through with flying colours though. US won't allow their only commercial plane maker to fail even if they need to build planes out of freshly printed Papier-mâché dollars
The 757 is out of production, although the tooling is in storage somewhere. Restarting production would be a huge undertaking by itself, not accounting for modernizing the airliner. It's all blueprints on sheets of paper. And Airbus could quite easily answer with a rewinged, slightly longer A320 (the long-rumored A322) that they admitted to have worked on... Although so far Airbus seems content with just the A321NEO-XLR: cheap to develop, and good-enough to replace most 757 out there (more or less, depending on the model of 757 and the route).
A modernized 767, on the other hand, could be a winner: it's still in production as a freighter and has been modernized for its military variant (KC-46A Pegasus). It's smaller than the 787-8 so wouldn't canibalize sales too much. On the other side the only Airbus competitor is the A330-800 which is too long-range optimized (and thus large/heavy/expensive) to be competitive against a hypothetical medium-haul optimized 767. Really the A330-800 is not even competitive against the A330-900, Airbus shouldn't have built it at all, if you ask me...
In the sense that they can still access liquidity from credit markets, yes. But they're paying a pretty hefty interest rate of 4.50% over the risk-free rate.[1]
That kind of borrowing cost, when compounded, starts to become pretty crippling for any sort of long-term R&D or product development. Compared to a high-grade corporate, a project with a 10-year payback time is 50% more expensive at Boeing's current cost of borrowing.
They'll save the company, but that doesn't mean 12k workers are coming back. And they're mostly concerned with the Defense/Military aspects -- are they going to fund the commercial side too?
(counterpoint -- the USG threw money at auto-makers)
While it doesn't say, these are likely very significantly manufacturing jobs, of course they'll come back. Orders are gone, cancelled, 737-MAX is stalled until the regulatory bits are done sorting out later this year, maintenance needs are way down, so you end up with empty or much slowed factories.
Boeing lays off a quarter of its workforce once or twice a decade. Airplanes are big, long term investments (big airliners tend to live to the ripe old age of 30 or so) and the demand and sale of them comes and goes with the global economy. The economy slows periodically, orders dry up, and factory workers don't have any work for a long time (or more like the years long order queue gets quite a bit shorter with old orders cancelled and few new orders coming in). It's a cyclical business that can't help but to make significant adjustments to its workforce.
A brief, incomplete and possibly inaccurate history of Boeing layoffs:
