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Production of Boeing 787 Dreamliner Delayed Again
Hugh Pickens writes "Boeing has discovered microscopic wrinkles in the skin of the 787's fuselage and has ordered Italian supplier Alenia Aeronautica to halt production of fuselage sections at a factory in Italy. 'In two areas on the fuselage, the structure doesn't have the long-term strength that we want,' says Boeing spokeswoman Lori Gunter. To repair the wrinkles, additional layers of carbon composite material are being added to a 787 at the South Carolina factory and twenty-two other planes must also be patched. Production of the 787 has been fraught with problems with ill-fitting parts, casting doubt on Boeing's strategy of relying on overseas suppliers to build big sections of the aircraft before assembling them at its facilities near Seattle. The 787, built for fuel efficiency from lightweight carbon composite parts, is a priority for Boeing as it struggles with dwindling orders amid the global recession. Customers had been expecting the first of the new jets in the first quarter of 2010 — nearly two years earlier than they will be delivered. The delays have cost Boeing credibility and billions of dollars in anticipated expenses and penalties. Orders for 72 planes have been canceled already this year, although Boeing still has confirmed orders for over 800 aircraft."
No, they're still trying to breath in and out very slowly and deliberately hoping that the A380 will fly financially. With the current economic climate, it will be a awhile before they're laughing again.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Why would it have been guaranteed to "work right the first time?"
The article indicates that it's a design fault. Either in the design of the manufacturing process, or earlier.
That tells me it's Boeing's fault that the problem exists, not the Italian manufacturers.
Now Boeing can finally pin the blame for all the delays on another company again.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Another victory for outsourcing your core competency.
Bigoted much?
There's no shortage of slipshod work done in the USA, or top-quality work done in foreign countries.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
They did this for several reasons. The first was to break the unions. The second, and more important, was to help sales. Sadly, America has some of the best knowledge of composites and the RIGHT place for this was here, not elsewhere. At this time, all of the issues that Boeing has is with offshored items (Production for china has been a QUIET NIGHTMARE for Boeing; Many of the parts are of VERY low quality). In fairness, my Wife and a number of friends work for Boeing, so I do get to see info that is not in the main-stream press.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The 787 is new. Most of the time if you're doing a construction project, you're doing something basically the same or very similar to something you've done before, so you can estimate it well. When this doesn't hold, construction projects end up estimated just as poorly as IT projects. IT projects are always something new; if what you wanted already existed, you'd probably just buy it.
I live in the Pacific Northwest, where Boeing used to do most everything. There is a strong belief up here - maybe because we feel screwed by Boeing - that Boeing moved production all over the place basically to bust one of the few strong unions we've had up here in Washington. I'm not a big union guy; but having watched Boeing's management and their treatment of their workers over the last 20 years... that's one place where I think a union is called for. It wasn't that long ago they laid off thousands of workers because of a downturn, yet found it in their hears to give the top-tier management very large (20% or so, IIRC) pay raises at the same time.
I've had friends who worked for Boeing (engineers, mostly) over the past couple of decades. Most of them have gotten out. When they started, there was a lot of pride amongst the workers at the company. That all went away, at least in the groups my friends worked in. And I do believe that companies whose employees are proud of their work do a better job than those who've stopped caring because they feel upper management has stopped caring about the product.
#DeleteChrome
Furthermore this is the first carbon composite airliner ever made. It's obviously going to have more problems than another aluminium plane. For example one of the problems with composites is that it is really easy to get subsurface delaminations that are very hard to detect. These problems are going to take time to solve.
Actually, in the normal Boeing process, these items are assembled regularly in various stages and made certain to fit (iterative process). The problem is that this is the first time that they have outsourced like this and were not capable of making design adjustments. This was a waterfall process. And the results are just like any waterfall process
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
American ethnocentrism. What a concept, huh? People who have never been out of the country are perfectly willing to judge things of which they know nothing.
Let us remember, the Russian people, under Soviet leadership, faced us throughout the cold war for decades. AND, they competed respectably in space. Running them down is pure ignorance, IMHO.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Yeah, but when you have more managers, more managers make more money.
It's a pyramid scheme, essentially. You move up the corporate ladder, and then hire a bunch of peons. As long as there are people below you, you don't have to work hard. The dollar difference between what a peon creates for the market, and his meager salary, is what pays yours.
You think I'm kidding, but it's true. Some people just want theirs. You're thinking about efficiency. That makes you an engineer, and that's how you end up being on the bottom ~:/
My day job is helping develop a new aircraft. It gives me some insight into what might be happening over there at Boeing. My take on the whole matter:
Boeing's first screwup was an entirely ridiculously aggressive schedule, one far more challenging than any of their previous projects. You'd think they would learn better, but apparently the latest batch of management monkeys figured they could make the impossible happen simply by declaring that it would, and expected the force of their words to be sufficient. (Lesson: things always take longer than you think they will. Use your worst-case estimate, not your best-case one)
Second, the outsourcing. Well, the outsourcing itself was not the problem, but rather it was the way they handled it. They farmed out major assemblies to far-flung companies, and then (here's the important part) didn't supervise them well enough. They simply took everyone's word that the engineering was sound and that they were on schedule with their builds. Everyone was actually late, but nobody wanted to admit it because nobody else was saying they were late. Eventually, they realized what was going on, but not after it was too late to fix it without causing too much of a delay. Boeing also failed to ensure that the fastener manufacturers would have their products ready in time... which would bite them in the ass later. (Lesson: Watch your subcontractors very, very carefully. Supervise their work, check their processes, and double-check their engineering)
Third, marketing. More specifically, the marketing types drove the program management and engineering decisions. Marketing wanted to shoot for a July 8 rollout to get an auspicious date... and thus commanded it to happen. Well, the only problem was that the airplane wasn't ready yet. Not only was it not assembled, but none of the internal systems were installed (they were supposed to be put in by the subcontractors, but everyone was late...). So what did they do? They slapped the empty sections together--with fasteners from Home Depot as a temporary fix, and painted it. That's right, they used ordinary hardware-store bolts in place of flightworthy fasteners because some marketing dweeb wanted to show "visual progress", and they didn't have the time to do it right. And not only did they use non-flightworthy parts, but they lost track of where they put them, meaning they had to go back and check all of the fasteners to make sure the temporary ones were removed. Boeing lost months because they had to go back and redo stuff that wasn't per spec. (Lesson: "visual progress" isn't. Half-assedly slapping something together to make it look like you've accomplished something just costs you more time, effort, and money down the road. Do it right the first time.*)
I don't know enough about the latest delays (structural issues) to be able to comment on them. But the earlier stuff I see parallels to in all kinds of places, even at work.
*Dear God that pisses me off to no end... I can't tell you how many times I've been told just to "hurry up and do it" because my manager wished to show "visual progress", only to have to go back and do it again, correctly. Tape measures and paper flat patterns simply can't be used to install mount points with tolerances in the thousandths... either get the proper tooling support to do it right, or fit the entire thing together before installation. "Visual progress" is right up there with "think of the children" in the "worst phrases of the English language" category...
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
"Ah, but the downside of the 380 is that you have to redesign the airports to take advantage of it. Otherwise it takes literally an hour to get everybody on and off."
Japan uses 7x7 airplanes with five hundred seats for some national routes. The redesigns for accomodating that number of passengers isn't great - split ramps with two exits rather than one - and the hardware is readily available. Unloading takes a few minutes. Even with one exit it would not take more than ten minutes. "literally an hour" is simply false.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
That changed when the plane was landing. At first I thought people were applauding, which was a bit surprising, but then I realized that the sound was that of the entire roof shaking, you could actually see the roof plates moving against each other.
Are you talking about the cabin interior panels? That's not the "roof". Those are just panels hung from the frame around the fuselage. They're not designed to be entirely rigid. In fact, in most airliners you can see that the holes cut in the panels where the various framing parts are designed to fit in are not round, they're oval. That's so that the panels can move back and forth.
It used to freak me out too when I saw interior panels move, but then I looked more closely and read up on how these things are actually attached to the fuselage, and now I realize it's just normal. It happens on every plane too - if you look closely at the interior panels in any airplane, even an American-made one, you will see the panels flex and move on takeoff and landing, and during turbulence. Some of this is caused by the airplane itself flexing - airplanes are designed to flex - but most of it is just caused by the panels themselves not being 100% rigid in how they're attached. It's nothing to worry about.
As a mid-career aerodynamics engineer in the American aviation industry, the one trend that I wish I could reverse is the perception that "the process is the product", or that with suitable care and attention to composing Interface Control Documents (ICD's), that the actual act of doing detail design - of applying the lessons learned by a successful technology company over decades of tech and product development - is a fall out.
It seems to me that Boeing's touting its expertise as a "systems integrator" is a direct reflection of this attitude. You can only achieve the expertise in "systems integration" if you have learned the lessons by actually doing. For fifty years or so, this was accomplished in this industry naturally - young engineers would come start their careers doing basic work (designing clips and brackets, plotting data, composing reports under senior engineers' supervision). Do that long enough, and you gain enough experience to begin to know where issues may lie, and procedures to take to avoid them. Eventually, one could move into a position of seniority where you would be the one overseeing younger engineers, and directing them what and what not to do.
Nowadays, it seems that the staffs in Systems Engineering (or SEIT) have no practical experience whatsoever. They are given checklists, written by the last wave of experts prior to their golden parachute retirement party, that tell them the most basic questions to ask and the most basic data to be documented, but don't have the hard won knowledge required to push the issue when required. Too often, design reviews are reduced to a SEIT team making sure their document list is complete - and not bothering to check that the information contained in those documents are accurate or applicable.
Great book on the development of the 747, "Widebody", by Clive Irving. In it, he points to the fact that what enabled the 747 was a direct result of all that came before it in Boeing's experience - from a monocoque fuselage in the 247 (and the importance of doing wind tunnel testing - and engineering - in house lest the results be pinched by the competition), through the complicated systems on the B-29, to the swept wing and podded engines of the 707. And the players in the 747 development were instrumental in all of those previous projects. He stresses the "design bibles" that were compiled across the technical specialties at Boeing - paid for in some cases by pilot lives (Eddie Allen and others). During the days of competition with the USSR to develop an SST, those design bibles were guarded as if they were state secrets.
Fast forward to today - Boeing outsources not on a build-to-print basis (as you would to a subcontractor), but a total systems solution. They are trusting their subs to design primary structure and produce them - a situation unimaginable in the old days. Maybe they could get away with that approach once - but if you do pursue that path, after you do this once when do you learn and how do you teach the next generation for future design projects? You don't. Who will be available in your home organization to raise the bullshit flag when a low cost subcontractor promises something that is patently impossible? No one, at least no one with the background of experience and technical reputation to be able to stand up to management, badge on the table, saying this shit won't fly.
Unfortunately for Boeing, and the US, I feel they have already mortgaged their ability to pull off this outsourcing by bleeding their technical staff over the past decade or so. They will eventually pull the 787 program together, and it will eventually pull a profit - lack of competition will insure that - but the break even point on this program will continue to slip to the right, just as it did on the L-1011 and the DC-10, and you can see what those programs did to their respective companies.
What, so big and powerful companies can't do a really cheap and dirty job to win contracts? Really? My guess is even if Boeing went with Alenia but didn't have a low bid be the main focus of vendor selection, problems like this would not happen and Alenia wouldn't have the cost-cutting motive that caused the change that caused this problem to begin with. Any company or group of engineers can make ugly parts if they are working with an ugly cost envelope.