Boeing gave up the wings primarily to curry favor with the Japanese. Japan is a critical airline market and flies almost exclusively Boeing aircraft. By outsourcing the wings to Mitsu Heavy, Boeing guarantees aircrafts sales and has one additional notch to help keep Airbus out of Japan.

The wings for the 787 are an entirely new design and are composite which is not something Boeing has done before to that extent, so they would have had to start over engineering and setting up manufacturing anyway. This way they basically get to wash their hands of it, while guaranteeing aircraft sales.

Unfortunately, this is short term thinking.

Japan, like China and Brazil, Canada and others, just to name a few, has intentions of getting in on the airline aircraft market and like those countries just mentioned, is already designing its own future airliners that will directly compete with Boeing and Airbus. No doubt, the technology and expertise gained from the outsourcing of wings to Mitsu Heavy will play a roll in Japanese aircraft development that will ultimately help to devastate Boeing and Airbus aircraft sales in the future.

To make matters worse, the world's largest airline market is China and like Japan, China tends to be nationalistic and would much sooner purchase their own aircraft than anything made by Boeing or Airbus. Boeing often sells to investors that China will eventually need to purchase thousands of aircraft, but if anyone thinks China will be purchasing aircraft made in the U.S. or Europe when it has a struggling airliner industry to prop up and promote, theyÆre crazy.

The bottom line is that Boeing and Airbus have a few good years left and are currently doing pretty well. But those days are seriously numbered and when real competitors start to enter the market, at the absolutely very least, Boeing will no longer be able to sustain its current business model and that means the remains of the large very well paid work force in the U.S. will likely end up going away.

In my opinion only.