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

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.