Aerospace stock Boeing (BA) recently revealed that its relationship with NASA has not been completely ruined by the Starliner project. It has been working with the agency on a new kind of wing configuration that could mean some exciting new advances in air travel. But investors did not welcome this news, and sent Boeing shares plummeting 4% in Wednesday afternoon’s trading.
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The wing configuration in question is known as “truss-braced,” and it uses a thinner wing than normal with structural supports added. The combination should allow future aircraft to be built with less weight, which means lower fuel costs to move it around. The truss-braced wing configuration, reports note, will also be part of the Subsonic Ultra Green Aircraft Research (SUGAR) operation.
The truss-braced wing configuration has recently undergone wind tunnel testing, and reports indicate that the move has proven a winner so far. Testing involved a “semispan” model, which is basically half an aircraft set on the floor of a wind tunnel and then subjected to wind. With such a model, the wind tunnel can simulate the low speed but high-lift settings required to test how the model behaves during takeoff and landing.
When Boeing Beat Concorde
Way back when, there was one major supersonic jet, and that was the Concorde. The high-speed connection between Europe and the United States, it was something of a legend in the field. But it turns out that Boeing had its own version of the Concorde, developed at great expense, and ultimately killed off because it was loud and put out a lot of gases despite its high speeds.
Boeing reportedly spent $1 billion on the project, reports noted, and ended up creating the Boeing 2707 back in the 1960s. It was larger than the Concorde, and also faster. But with four General Electric (GE) GE4 turbojet engines that allowed the aircraft to reach Mach 2.7, concerns about its sheer amount of emissions—plus the matter of a regular sonic boom in the United States—left deep concerns, and led to Congress canceling the project altogether.
Is Boeing a Good Stock to Buy Right Now?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on BA stock based on 16 Buys and one Hold assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 25.91% rally in its share price over the past year, the average BA price target of $274.57 per share implies 23.78% upside potential.
