CANBERRA — South Korea appears poised to order 60 Boeing F-15SE Silent Eagles for its F-X Phase 3 competition, throwing a lifeline to the venerable fighter’s production line and offering the manufacturer an opportunity to improve it for future contests.

Boeing Aerostructures Australia is working on complex parts that require less assembly than current components. The division’s Melbourne plant, highly focused on production engineering development, also is developing new resins for composites while a third area of research is the application of robots for repairs of composite structures, company officials say.

At some point, mainland China will need more than three international hub airports. Funneling the international traffic of a country of 1.3 billion people through Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou will not make sense forever, and even now the geographical distribution of the three is awkward. The hubs, each the base of one of China's three biggest airlines, are on the eastern and southern periphery of China's main population zone, so the country lacks a central or western gateway.