MCDONNELL THINKS JUMBO : COMPANY ACCELERATES STUDIES CALLING FOR COMPETITION WITH BOEING 747.

Byline: Russ Britt Daily News Staff Writer

McDonnell Douglas Corp. may build a new jumbo jet to compete with Boeing Co.'s well-known 747, a sign that McDonnell's passenger plane business is pulling out from a half-decade of turbulence.

McDonnell's Long Beach plant is speeding up internal studies examining a variety of planes, including a 400-seat aircraft, said company spokesman Don Hanson. Slow sales forced the company to abort a project for a 550-seat plane in 1992.

``The object is to get those studies concluded so we can reach a decision sometime in the third quarter of this year,'' Hanson said.

Hanson said the market for new planes finally appears to be on the upswing after five years of sluggishness, and demand for jumbo jets is increasing. Although orders for the rest of McDonnell's other passenger planes are slow, competition for jumbo jets is expected to heat up.

One question to be answered if McDonnell goes ahead with a new jumbo jet is where it will be built. The company originally intended to perform much of the previous jumbo jet work at facilities other than Long Beach because the plant was near capacity.

Although the plant has 25 percent of the work force from its 1990 peak, it is filled with equipment used to assemble the company's current line of planes, Hanson said.

Hanson said no potential employment figures are available. But some large plane programs can require up to 10,000 workers on final assembly alone.

McDonnell Douglas tried to get its MD-12 jumbo jet project off the ground in 1991. The company had announced it was selling part of its business to Taiwan Aerospace Corp. to build the jet, but those plans fell apart a year later as aircraft sales plummeted worldwide.

McDonnell was hit hardest as the third major provider of aircraft behind Boeing and the European consortium Airbus Industrie.

McDonnell's passenger jet work force is one-fourth of what it was in 1990, going from 40,000 to 10,000. Within the past two years, however, McDonnell's payroll has steadied and aircraft orders are up.

Last year, McDonnell was able to launch a new twin-engine, 129-seat jetliner with a 100-plane order from Valujet Airlines Inc.

The jumbo jet market during the next 20 years could be worth $300 billion, said Barbara Beyer, president of Avmark Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based airline consulting firm. Boeing is likely to capture at least half that with its 747 line, and the remainder is up for grabs between Airbus and McDonnell.

But McDonnell is playing catch-up with its competitors, Beyer said. The company's next largest plane, the 300-seat MD-11, took three years to develop and cost $1.5 billion.

``Airbus has been looking at that for quite some time but never did anything on it,'' Beyer said. ``(McDonnell is) going to start from scratch. Again, they're behind the eight ball.''