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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.
it scares the shit out of me just to think if Microsoft made airplanes.
The advantages of the 787 so ridiculously out class it's peers (weight savings with agressive use of composites) that as long as there's nothing forth coming that competes with it, it won't matter. Back in the 90's when I paid 98 cents for a gallon of gas shaving 1 lb off the weight of an aircraft saved airlines 20k a year in operating costs for that aircraft. Now with oil prices so high, imagine the savings by shaving up to 1/3 of the weight of some parts looks like?
Ok, so everybody schedules aggressively, and everybody has unforseen delays. It's kind of funny now remembering how Boeing were crowing over the A380 problems, but what I'd like to know is how the 380 vs 787 delays stack up against each other.
Anyone got a clue?
I'm old... and I ain't gittin in one of them
thar newfangled plastic planes never no-how!
Delivery date met or not!
Dadnabit!
Git off my larn!
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
At this point, it seems everyone would be happy for it to arrive in any state.
Not me. When I catch a plane to California, I sure don't wanna end up anywhere else!
Well, that depends on what your calculations say. Does running three 787s on one route twice a day work out cheaper than two A380's once a day? What do your projections say: do expect to continue running the same route for the next ten or twenty years?
When the bill is hundreds of millions of [dollars|Euros] you don't make your decision based on whether one is made with a cooler process than the other.
There are more air planes in the sea than submarines in the sky.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Sound and fuel costs. We currently have no way of stopping the sonic boom caused by an aircraft, so flying over populated areas supersonic is completely out of the question, and designing an aircraft that can carry an economical number of people longhaul while traveling at supersonic speeds but also while not costing an arm and a leg to operate is not an easy feat - you have to use a tremendous amount of fuel to get to your cruise speed (fuel usage drops off quite sharply actually after around Mach 1.2 - the biggest fuel usage area is the Mach 0.95 - Mach 1.5 areas) and people are no longer willing to pay the sort of money that would take.
Its worth noting however, that Concorde, while a program failure, was quite profitable for British Airways in operation - at some points it was BAs most profitable area of operations across its entire business.
Uh I am a bit fuzzy on the details - used to be an aviation nut - but there is a payoff between fuel used/distance traveled/paying passengers.
Concorde just couldn't ride that fine balance economocally enough.
Then - most countries do not allow supesonic overflights - I remember concorde had to fly subsonic while over land and could only go supersonic while over the ocean on the trans atlantic crossing.
The Concorde was noisy - the engines needed to push a large plane to go that fast are very noisy, no leaky turbofans here - and with airports being so close to cities the overflights over suburban areas were problematic.
There is the issue of the optimum aerodynamic shape - there are basically three wing shapes: Swing wing (think B1 Bomber), works well in subsonic and supersonic flight - it is efficient during both flight profiles, but the mechanics is heavy. Probably the best option for the future.
"Normal" swept wings - not optimal for supersonic flight. Is the optimum configuration for carrying heavy loads long distances.
Delta Wings (Like the Concorde) - great for high speed flight, the Valkyrie bomber used a nice Delta wing design that "rode" the shock wave of supersonic flight at high speed to conserve fuel. It is not an optimum load carrying wing, and is not good for low-speed flight. Delta wings have a poor take-off and landing performance, i.e. it means that it lands and takes off at a high speed, and the landing profile is very "low" meaning it flies low over urban areas when taking off and landing. Also it needs a long runway to take off and land - the larger the plane the longer the runway needed. Whereas a wing for the A380 could be optimised for better performance in this flight envelope and not lose a lot of performance when it is actually airborne, for a delta the line to be walked is much finer.
Thus while the speed of supersonic flight would be great for international travel - plus the coolness factor - and there are technologies available today that were not available to the designers of the Concorde and Valkyrie (composite materials for one) there is still the trade-off of a wide range of flight envelopes (take-off, landing, subsonic flight, supersonic flight), size (the bigger you go the less efficient any design is), fuel use (supersonic flight uses a LOT of fuel - hence impacting plane size which makes the design less efficient and on and on) and then the greenies of course haha that makes large supersonic airlines not economically viable today.
Then also designing a supersonic superjumbo is a lot more expensive than is the case for a subsonic superjumbo. Development time is also much longer due to the newer tech, optimizing the design for all the flight profiles, engine design...
It is just not economically viable. It would actually make more sense to design a passenger liner that would "hop" into space to cross vast distances in the upper stratosphere and then fly down to land like a subsonic jetliner.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
And I guess the executives who agreed on the name dreamliner are starting to regret their decision...
When you are talking about near supersonic or supersonic speeds, this is no longer true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_divergence_Mach_number In fact, drag increases much more rapidly as you approach the speed of sound, but then much more slowly after that point.
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."
The Airbus isn't some magical solution applicable to all situations, and there are many where the 787 is the better option, but it's disingenuous to say the A380 is some kind of relic of a time gone by, a plane that doesn't meet the requirements of today's airlines.
Man, that is so out of date.
Unix Express: Split into three operating companies.
Linux Cooperative:
All passenger bring a piece of the aeroplane and a box of tools with them to the airport. They gather on the tarmac, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they want to build and how to put it together. Eventually, the passengers split into groups and build several different aircraft, but give them all the same name. Some passengers actually reach their destinations.
All passengers believe they got there.
Apple Airlines:
The terminal is neat and clean, the attendants are attractive, the pilots very capable, the planes are beautiful, and you always reach the correct destination... unfortunately they have a fairly small fleet, most planes have no baggage compartment or overhead storage, and the seats aren't adjustable. Frequent Apple fliers are known to attack anyone who suggests that these are important features.
Legacy Air:
The terminal is neat and clean, albeit in an "industrial" style. You have to choose your plane ahead of time, because different planes only fly to different cities, and if your luggage doesn't match your plane you need to hire a baggage consultant to adjust it to fit. But the planes are fast, efficient, and always arrive on time or even ahead of schedule.
Windows Airlines:
The terminal is very neat and clean, with security barriers every few meters. The attendants are attractive, even if it's kind of creepy how much they want to "help" (especially in the restrooms). The pilots are allegedly very capable, though nobody ever sees them and there's an armed guard by the cockpit door. The fleet of jets it operates are immense. Your jet takes off without a hitch, pushing above the clouds, and at 20,000 feet a message pops up on the seat back in front of your asking "Should this plane explode now?". Some idiot always answers "Yes".
Another concern for continued high-speed operation is the engines. Jet engines create thrust by increasing the temperature of the air they ingest, and as the aircraft speeds up, this air increases in temperature before it reaches the engines. The maximum temperature of the exhaust is determined by the materials in the turbine at the rear of the engine, so as the aircraft speeds up the difference in intake and exhaust temperature the engine can extract decreases, and the thrust along with it. Air cooling the turbine area was a key solution, which continued to improve though the 1950s and on to this day.
Intake design is also a major issue. The engine can only ingest subsonic air, so ramps in the intake are used to create shock waves that slow the airflow before it reaches the engine. Doing so removes energy from the airflow, causing drag. The key to reducing this drag was to use multiple small oblique shock waves, but this was difficult because the angle they made inside the intake changed with changes in Mach number. In order to efficiently operate across a range of speeds, the shock waves had to be "tuned." North American had already worked with advanced inlets on the A3J supersonic bomber for the U.S. Navy, which featured multiple ramps which were moved and angled automatically.
An aircraft able to operate for extended periods at supersonic speeds has a potential range advantage over a similar design operating subsonically. Most of the drag an aircraft sees while speeding up to supersonic speeds occurs just below the speed of sound, due to an aerodynamic effect known as wave drag. An aircraft that could fly past this speed saw a significant drag decrease, and could cruise supersonically with improved fuel economy. However, due to the way lift is generated supersonically, the lift-to-drag ratio of the aircraft as a whole drops, leading to lower range, offsetting or overturning this advantage.
The key to having low supersonic drag is to properly shape the overall aircraft to be long and skinny, as close as possible to a "perfect" shape, the von Karman ogive or Sears-Haack body. This has led to almost every supercruising aircraft looking very similar, with a very long and skinny fuselage and large delta wings, cf. SR-71, Concorde, etc. Although not ideal for passenger aircraft, the shaping is quite adaptable for bomber use.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
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.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.