Boeing 787 Dreamliner Delayed Again

An anonymous reader writes "It's not just that the Boeing 787 Dreamliner may be unsafe or vulnerable to hacker attacks. At this point, it seems everyone would be happy for it to arrive in any state. The 787's carbon-fiber construction and next-generation technology have pushed back their delivery schedule once again, this time requiring a redesign of the plane's wingbox. Airlines will have to wait 18 more months to get it delivered, which is an extremely serious blow to the credibility of the company and their financial standing, as they would have to pay penalties to the buyers of more than 850 of these planes. And we thought Airbus had problems." Good thing Boeing can still count on its patent portfolio.

Comments

Can someone enlightened with engineering....

[lbbros]

explain to me what issues are there for which in 2008 we still have to resort to sub-sonic air flights? I wonder that sometimes (and I also wonder on Concorde's failure for the same reason)

Yes, somewhat OT, but it's been bugging me for a while.

Re:Can someone enlightened with engineering....

[basiles]

The Concorde was extremely fuel hungry, even if supersonic. IIRC, Concorde is one of the few civilian aircrafts (I am not talking of military aircraft) whose take-off mass was more than 50% kerosene - so a Concorde was at take-off a huge amount of kerosene with some metal and human flesh... BTW, most of the time in my trips (only in Europe - I'm French) is not spent flying. It is spent to reach (or go away from) the airport and waiting. Supersonic flights (that are much too expensive for me) do not help here. So subsonic flights do make sense, and even more non aircraft traveling, e.g. high speed trains like TGV (traveling quite fast, without much waiting, from center of cities to center of cities) or ICE. And my feeling is that TGV trains are more friendly to environment (In France, the electric power is mostly nuclear) and much more comfortable. BTW, I never understood why there are so few high speed trains in the USA.

Re:Can someone enlightened with engineering....

[AndGodSed]

the engines needed to push a large plane to go that fast are very noisy, no leaky turbofans here

In terms of passengers and cargo capacity Concorde was not a large aircraft. Well, as far as supersonic aircraft go the Concorde was big - Bigger than the B1 if I am not mistaken, and I have been at an airshow where a B1 did a few fly-by's (with and without 'burner - schweet...) and it is NOISY!

The Valkyrie never made it out of the prototype stage. IIRC the wingtips would fold downwards in supersonic cruise. It did make a maiden flight - and an F104 crashed into it and the program was killed. It sucks to think that this beauty was killed off due to no fault of its own. Yes the wingtips folded down.

With the TU144 retractable canards were needed to ensure stability at low speeds. Yes, and one crashed during an Airshow - grounding the project as well...

A conventional swept wing comes with flaps, slats and slots which are used to vary the shape of the wing (and make it considerably larger) for takeoff and landing. This creates more lift, at the expense of increased drag, which enables the aicraft to take off and land at much lower speeds. Yes, and with a delta having poor Angle of Attack characteristics and being inherently low drag the extra mechanics needed to make it behave like a conventional swept wing at low speeds is prohibitively heavy.

The funny thing is

[WindBourne]

that Boeing which has a number of old MS engineers will have nothing to do with installing Windows in the cockpit and only rarely on the craft (they do use dos on the older seat controls).

OTH, Airbus pushes that crap. They (and jeppesen) went to MS to try and get MS to DO-178B ANY version of Windows. After reading it, Gates actually responded that it would be another 1-2 decades before they could even THINK about doing something like that.

Re:It matters. But really it doesn't.

[Solandri]

Not to mention the serious decline in the number of open takeoff and landing spots at many airports. The rise in air travel combined with the trend towards smaller aircraft has helped choke many of them.

Airlines are being faced with the situation of not having the ability to add more and more flights to their schedules from certain locations. So it's not even necessarily a choice between fuel cost X and fuel cost Y. More like "We've got Z number of landing spots, and we can free up three of them with one plane. We can serve other markets with the two open spots the A380 gives us."

There are plenty of open slots. It's just the major hub airports which are having capacity problems. Both the A380 and 787 were designed as solutions to this problem. The A380 tries to solve it by increasing capacity per plane when flying hub to hub. The 787 tries to solve it by eliminating the hub and flying point to point.

The main rationale for using a hub is fuel efficiency by reducing the overall number of flights. A fuel efficient small plane can tip the balance the other way and make point to point routes economically viable again, as well as allowing less-used airports become hubs (since the number of passengers per plane is lower, you don't need to as many passengers to justify a hub flight). Based on the number of pre-orders the 787 has gotten, it would appear that the airlines all did the math and it came out in favor of the point to point routes.

Re:Comparison Boeing is getting lazy

[PPH]

The biggest problem is the the US Government should have blocked the Boeing / Mc Donald Douglas merger. Then Boeing would have competition and have to actually work to be in business, not just know they had the US Military corporate welfare check in their pockets.

Douglass Aircraft was, for all practical purposes, dead. McD-D had no real interest in building commercial aircraft and pushed much of the process out of the company.

After McD-D lost that big fighter contract, they were dead in the water. Boeing probably could have waited for the bankruptcy sale and picked up the pieces that they wanted. But the "merger" was a bailout for the McDonnell family. Had the company gone under, they would have gotten pennies on the dollar for their shares.

In fact, there are those who suspect that the Pentagon (friends of the McDonnells) encouraged Boeing to merge, using the last stage of the fighter contract competition as bait. It was a real sucker move on Boeing's part. Worse yet, much of Boeing's management has been replaced with McDonnell-Douglas management. That might be why we are seeing Boeing Commercial head down the same path Douglas Aircraft went.