Boeing will announce its year-end earnings on Wednesday. As MarketWatch notes, analysts are going to want to hear more about what Boeing's going to do about the 787 this year than they will about last year's sales successes.

Wall Street also is worried about how far orders will slow in 2008, and whether Boeing's going to be able to keep its massive six-year backlog of orders intact.

The backlog issue is the one that I think's most-important, both for Boeing investors, and for those of us around Washington who rely on Boeing paychecks to feed our top lines.

There are signs that Longacres already is hard at work on the question.

Boeing today identified a Middle Eastern investment group as the previously unidentified buyer of eight 777 cargo planes.

This deal could represent the challenge Boeing faces in the year ahead. The eight planes originally were ordered by Avion Group, an Icelandic aerospace investment fund. But Avion later canceled the deal, leaving Boeing with eight open delivery slots on its 777F production line. Boeing, however, was able to place those planes with Deucalion Capital VII Ltd. of Bahrain. 

Deucalion plans to lease the planes to a newly formed German joint venture of Lufthansa Cargo and DHL Express.

And thus Boeing's sales team saves a deal originally worth about $2 billion at list prices. Avion Group probably paid closer to $1.4 billion when it first made the order. Deucalion's most-likely paying less than that, the deal keeps the order on the books and keeps Boeing from getting stuck with eight 777Fs.

As I've said before - one of the biggest challenges Boeing faces in 2008 will be to find new buyers for planes it sold during the 2005-07 bull market to airlines and leasing companies that now are having second thoughts. Many of those deals will involve Middle Eastern companies that are flush with petro euros.

Team Tolouse has many of the same issues as Boeing. Today they lost a deal for thee A350s previously ordered by an Italian regional carrier EuroFly.  The airline had been scheduled to take delivery of its planes in 2013-14, but said in a regulatory filing that Airbus wanted to push back those delivery dates by 24 months. That prompted the airline to cancel the order.

So far, Airbus' sales team has been able to keep the A350 order book largely intact. That's only going to get more challenging, however, as the year goes on.

Nonetheless, one stock-picker told CNBC he thinks Boeing will get a bounce this week after its favorable earnings report. You, in turn, might want to bounce that idea off your investment advisor.

Boeing shares are up a little this morning.