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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!
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.
It's a little more than just outsourcing - Boeing had cut their internal engineering resources to the point where they didn't have the capacity to do all of design work in house. Since you don't just go out and hire a few thousand airframe structural engineers the only option left was to outsource - and now it turns out the partners they had vastly overstated their capabilities. After all, any engineer is the same as any other, right?
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.
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.
This Youtube video was sent to me from a friend that works at Boeing (not in the commercial division). About sums things up.
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.
Boeing is designing a permanent fix to the wrinkle problem so future versions of the plane won't have to be modified. The existing fuselage wrinkles, she said, will not compromise the flight safety of the 787s.
The existing fuselage wrinkles might not compromise the flight safety of the 787s, but they will weigh and cost a lot more than planned because of the extra layers of carbon composite material. The added weight will reduce fuel efficiency for the entire lifetime of the airplane, which further increases the cost of use of these planes for the airlines that will be buying them. As for the permanent fix:
Boeing said tests had shown it needed to reinforce areas where the plane's wings join the fuselage.
You can bet this means all future 787s will weigh more than Boeing told their investors they would, which means some companies who slightly prefered 787s over an alternative by, say, Airbus, might also cancel their orders and buy from the competition instead.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
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.
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 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
The problems are with barrels that aren't even close to production yet. Boeing (in as much as you can believe them anymore) says that this will not delay the production of the 787 (to first flight) of the 787 any further than it already has been.
This information is out there, is it so difficult to go find it before publishing wrong info instead?
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/flightblogger/2009/08/breaking-structural-flaw-halts.html
Oh yeah, and the problem with the sections isn't with the skin, it's with the stringers behind them. It leads to wrinkles in the skin, but the real fix is to not mess up the stringers in the first place.
The statement that this casts even more doubt on the outsourcing model set up at Boeing under Alan Mullaly is most definitely not diminished by the inaccuracies in the reporting of these details.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Stop spreading this myth.
From Snopes:
Claim:NASA spent millions of dollars developing an "astronaut pen" which would work in outer space while the Soviets solved the same problem by simply using pencils.
Status:False.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
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.
It's a manufacturing problem related to the connection between the fuselage stringers and skin. Alenia and Boeing have known about it for a while. Alenia can't make the stringers with a close enough tolerance on the landing (the "bottom" that bonds to the skin) to get a proper cure of the skin and Boeing refuses to relax the tolerances. Until they can agree on a manufacturing fix they have stopped work.
The fix for the parts already made is to put an exterior patch. That's usually a last resort but not unheard of. Customers don't like to get new airplanes with visible patches on them.
Alenia has scrapped two barrels and sectioned them to get a good look at the internals of the problem. The manufacturing fix will be pretty straightforward, probably a few extra plies in the skin to make up for some reduced thickness in the stringer landing.
Alenia likely did a facir (first article conformity inspection report) on the first barrel which is where they cut the first barrel up and look at sections to find wrinkles and other things. The problem is, they changed the mfg process on the stringers after the facir. Not unusual, but they blew it when they asserted that the new method would be equivalent to the original that passed the facir.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Who knows, but you don't have to be Alanis Morissette to see the irony of an Italian plant making fuselages for Boeing, and a Seattle coffee company wanting to sell me something called a "grandee latte."
I don't care why you're posting AC
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.
They should just do what we do in software. Slap a beta label on it and ship it out the door. Then act condescending when someone complains that their plane crashed.
With Boetox?
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
Citation Provided.
Accidents by aircraft type.
Fatalities by aircraft type.
The Boeing 737 NG, 757 and 767 have crashed more times then A330 and A340's. If we include older aircraft such as the B737 (Classic) and B747 vs the A320 and A300 we have the same story.
Airbus' highest fatality for a single aircraft type A300 - 1423 deaths.
Boeing's highest fatality for a single aircraft type B737 - 3990 deaths.
That being said, if you are boarding any type of aircraft you have already survived the most dangerous part of your journey, the drive to the airport.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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
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
The Big Dig numbers you quote are rather distorted by inflation and included interest costs. Stripping out these factors the original cost estimate works out to 6bil and the final cost is 14.8bill.
The 787 overruns PRIOR to this wrinkle problem are 11bil.
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
Perhaps you'd prefer Scientific American: http://preview.tinyurl.com/lvnqa3
rj
The Big Dig numbers you quote are rather distorted by inflation and included interest costs.
I think the fact that you have to adjust for inflation is a good indication that something went wrong.
That tells me it's Boeing's fault that the problem exists, not the Italian manufacturers.
No, it's Alenia's.
There are two issues here. The first is that the wing body join failed earlier than it was supposed to - that's a design fault on Boeing's part. The second is that starting with the seventh frame, the fuselage skin was wrinkled. That's a production fault.
Alenia has since admitted that they changed production processes after the seventh frame, and something having to do with that change caused the faults. This issue has already been resolved. The information in this article is apparently a bit old, although the issues it brings up are still at least somewhat valid... though there is honestly no practical way of building an airliner these days without using offshore suppliers. But it highlights the dangers of lowest-bidder contracts.
"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.
Please stop spreading bullshit. Tn the history of aviation there are far more crashes caused by pilot error than caused by fly by wire. Also, flying Boeing is potentially much more fatal.
Let's compare the statistics for the A320 family and the Boeing 737 family - that's the airplane you are most likely to fly.
Of the 6000 delivered Boeing 734 planes there were 144 hull-loss accidents resulting in 3847 fatalities. Of the 3958 delivered A32x there were 20 hull-loss accidents with a total of 631 fatalities.
Yes, that's right. There are only 1.5 times more delivered Boeing 737 but they have a 5 times higher hull-loss accident rate a 6 times higher fatality rate. Correcting for the same number of machines there would be 4.8 times more hull-loss accidents and 4 times more fatalities at Boeing.
Maybe you should change your sitting location.
Ah, by the way, A32x is pure fly by wire.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap