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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!
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."
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.
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
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
Many of the parts are of VERY low quality
A yes the old scape goat, blame the Chinese because we gave the contract to the cheapest Chinese manufacturer. The A380 also gets many of it parts made in China and they dont have these so called issues mainly because the Chinese will build a quality product if you insist on it, yes it costs more but then you get what you pay for. I work for a company that gets all it's products made in China and "we have no quality issues" because we have defined what we need and what we expect and paid the extra money to get it. It is almost as if American companies forgot the term "quality control" and "ISO standards" when it came to dealing with the Chinese because the Chinese do know about both these factors.
The A380 also gets many of it parts made in China and they dont have these so called issues mainly because the Chinese will build a quality product if you insist on it, yes it costs more but then you get what you pay for. THe 380 gets VERY few parts outside of Europe. And yes, there is very little of Chinese made products in it. And as to quality from China, it is sketchy. Some are there, others are not.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.