Boeing Faces Plenty Of Questions But Gives Few Answers At Farnborough By Chris Genna FARNBOROUGH, England – Boeing President and Chief Operating Officer Harry Stonecipher got plenty of questions but didn't provide many answers at the year's premier Aerospace Industry trade show Monday. Stonecipher was up-front to his audience -- a room packed with journalists – about recent management changes at Boeing Commercial Airplane Group; but he had to be or they'd have asked anyway. "Woodard was not a sacrificial lamb," Stonecipher said of ousted BCAG President Ron Woodard. "I don't believe in them." "The real cause of the management changes," he said, "has to do with the inability of (Woodard's) management team to focus, or … convince Mr. Condit and myself they could achieve the double-digit margin we want out of the Commercial Airplane Group." He insisted that "Phil Condit will survive." Boeing's chairman and CEO was conspicuous by his absence; observers say he has been at every Farnborough or Paris air show for the past three years. Stonecipher acknowledged that "the last year, in many ways, has been a difficult and disappointing one for Boeing … we've let down many commercial airplane customers through late deliveries. That's not tolerable. It's not acceptable." He promised that "Where we're too big, we're going to get smaller. Where we have been doing too many things – in too many places – we are going to do fewer things in fewer places." Stonecipher said Boeing will sell some assets, but only "the small things that distract you" like the commercial light helicopter line Boeing has put on the block. The company won't offload things "we do better than anyone else," he said, but since Boeing's acquisition of McDonnell Douglas in mid 1997 and Rockwell International's air and space units a few months earlier, the company "has 30 million square feet of manufacturing space we don't need." The decisions have already been made to close some labs, machine shops and composites shops, Stonecipher said, without offering specifics. Asked about Sea Launch, Boeing's joint venture with Russian and Norwegian companies to launch satellites from mid-ocean, he said the command ship is in its Long Beach, Calif., home port and the floating platform is on its way there from Singapore. He said nothing about the transfer-of-technology issues raised recently by the U.S. government. Stonecipher predicted the Asian financial crisis will last two to five years, and the biggest question now is if it will spread to the rest of the globe. But neither he nor commercial group Vice President Bruce Dennis would put any numbers with the regional downturn, other than the 150 jets the company has repeatedly said may be delayed or canceled. "We've been lucky; they're not generally been canceled," Dennis said. "The situation is dynamic, it's changing on a daily basis, so stay tuned." Boeing sticks with its prediction to sell 550 jetliners this year, and 620 in 1999; but after that, the industry may retrench. At any rate, Stonecipher indicated, Boeing is stepping back from a "market share" contest with archrival Airbus Industrie. "When we get (down) to a price that we can't make money at, then we back away," Stonecipher said. "We're not going to give 'em away." Commercial group Vice President Bruce Dennis, too, said, "You're going to see a de-emphasizing of this market share battle. We have to satisfy our customers, our shareholders and our employees, and market share is just one of the measures used to tell you how well we're doing. But lately, market share is about all Airbus is being measured by." "We'd like to raise the margins on all our planes," Dennis told reporters after the briefing. "We've lost some big deals lately where we couldn't meet the price being offered by Airbus." Boeing recently increased the price of all its jets, Stonecipher said – its first general price increase in 23 years. But he also said Boeing's profitability problems "are not pricing but costs. We did this to ourselves; and we did it inside our own factories."