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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."
Sounds like the start up of the 747. Boeing nearly bankrupted the company by pushing the envelope in plane design and manufacturing when many people didn't think the business model would work out. They're at the same point again for the same reasons, so we will see if they can do it again.
But Boeing is lots more than the Commercial Airplane group; I believe they are the number one or two US defense contractor so even if the 787 takes a long time to break even, the company will still survive.
If, however, the plane actually flops because of the choices they made (heavy use of composites PLUS heavy outsourcing), then Commercial Airplane may lose enough money to trash the company.
Remember folks, this is why you pay your high end executives lots of money....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Not all of the outsourcing is done to save pennies (although many of them undoubtedly are).
For example, many of the composite parts are produced in Japan for two reasons: 1) Japan has some of the best composite material manufacturers in the world, and 2) lucrative subcontracting business from Boeing distracts the Japanese from trying to produce a 787 competitor of their own. The latter is especially important, not just because the last thing Boeing needs is another credible competitor in the mid-to-large airliner market; it is also because a stronger Japanese aviation industry may also be tempted to design jet fighters on its own, which would destroy the single biggest export market for US military aircraft in the world.
It's wierd - I used to think IT projects were the only projects that were impossible to accurately estimate. A lot of PMs I run into at work seem to think a software project is the same as a construction project, but I think they're totally different. There is little change in the time it takes to pour a certain amount of concrete, run standard electrical for a commercial building, or other construction/product build tasks. In software-land, since everything's so fluid, it's anyone's guess how much time it'll take to fix some crazy bug, install hardware, debug a hardware or software installation, or write documentation. And even when a construction project over-runs its time, you pretty much know exactly how far off you are and how long until you're on track again.
Now this 787 project comes out and blows my assumptions away! Apparently you CAN overrun a construction or build project's time and budget just as easily as IT projects.
From what I've been reading, the fact that Boeing basically outsourced everything but final assembly of the plane to different contractors has come back to bite them. One of my IT specialties is integration work -- and I've worked on a lot of contracted software products that totally don't work when you get their individual parts back and mash them together.
Part of me really wants to gloat and say, "Ha ha, you listened to a bunch of retarded MBA consultants who convinced you that lean production and lowest-bidder subcontracting was the way to go!". BUT, I really can't. Boeing's in a lot of trouble if they can't pull off a major integration/rework effort right away. Airplanes are one of the last things the US actually makes and exports from a manufacturing perspective, so it's important that they just drop everything and figure out what's wrong. Airbus will be more than happy to sell A340s, A350s and A380s to all the waiting airlines.
But deep down, I still think those MBAs should have thought a little bit about how many thousands of parts and systems a typical plane has...
I worked for Northrop many decades ago when the Boeing 747 was first being built. Northrop made these body sections for Boeing. These were in the days of actual blueprints on paper, although they had advanced to microfilm aperture cards to print from by that point ;)
The skins had little angled stringers attached to the inside surface, painted with some horrible green mixture. The draftsman who drew them used the wrong width pen, and these stringers turned out to be 1/2mm shorter than they needed to be. Not a real problem you'd think, but there were thousand of them running lengthwise across the skin.
By the time the stringer had reached the cargo door (65BO1859 - god how some things stick in your head) they were about half a meter short. This had a major structural impact on the airframe, so they had to go (literally) back to the drawing board to solve the problem.
Subtle business, building your average jumbo jetliner.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
My brother is an engineer at Boeing... he claims that this is the most screwed up engineering project in terms of cost in human history. I think he has a point.
Oh, I can't imagine it's beat the Big Dig just yet, though it may be on its way. Looks like the relative costs of the two programs are similar...but the Big Dig was a 10-fold cost overrun (from about $2B to $20B.
In more similar endeavors, there's always the Osprey, also coming in at about $20B. Funny, Boeing was one of the co-developers on that clusterfudge too.
Boeing's core compentency is composite airframes?! From an engineering perspective, sub-contracting out parts of the plane was the only chance they had of making it possible. I've been in some of the big autoclaves used for major parts, and it is a bit simplistic to think that Boeing could have done all the manufacturing in-house.
But, their supposed core competency, integration, seems to be more lacking.
Ultimately, when these things first crash it is going to be an interesting case of finger pointing.
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.
I'm sure the corporate weasels at Airbus will manage a few smug smiles at the expense of the corporate weasels at Boeing after all the detailed coverage of A380 delays by aviation/business journalists, bloggers and other "industry observers" from the other side of the pond. In the long run the A380 has every chance of being a success just like the 747 was. The 380 has operating costs that are more or less the same as a 747 but with the capability to carry a substantially greater number of passengers with a quite low per-passenger cost. There are plans now to build all-coach A380s which are projected to cut air fairs by up to 30% on some routes. Even if they manage to realize even only a third of that price cut the A380 might actually end up benefitting from the current economic climate on inter-hub hauls. It won't be the worlds most comfortable ride but for a 10% price cut I'll put up with being stuck in an 840 seat giant sardine can for a few hours.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Since we're trading war stories...
Once I was hired at a sub to do the structural analysis on an empennage. The finite element model was supplied by the OEM and just by chance I did a sanity check by importing the catia geometry into patran and overlaid it on the mesh. Turns out the mesh for the whole horizontal stabilizer was 2" too high.
I have a good one from testing too. The same OEM had this jet going through cert testing and one of the tests is a particularly nasty scenario where an entire fuselage is pressurized then this big dagger thing punches a big slit in it about 40" long. The hope is that the big gash doesn't propagate and cause the fuselage to, you know, explode. This is supposed to simulate an engine explosion. Sadly the fuse went boom. That cost a bit to fix.
Speaking of things that are the wrong length, that happened to the A380 wiring. Things like that aren't supposed to happen with catia and all that. I heard that various people blamed it on different contractors using different versions of catia which doesn't make much sense. Probably just a basic mistake some designer made that never got caught.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
No, you can bet that the competitors will win because repairing a graphite defect/delamination/crack/ requires a $100,000 hot bonder + materials as opposed to $0.10 worth of aluminum, $0.01 worth of rivets, and $80.00 worth of rivet gun.
Composites are really neat, and I love working on them, but mfg.+maint. of composite > mfg.+maint. of aluminum aircraft.
Just speaking from the air force side of things- going from Al to Carbon requires a manning increase in the structures shop of at least 3X. Graphite is a totally new game that most structures guys are simply not prepared to cope with. You need to take that into account when you're comparing budgets.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
I would hardly call Alenia just a lowest bid contractor. They are a big and respectable company.