New Boeing 787 Jetliner Faces Another Delay

New Boeing 787 Jetliner Faces Another Delay

The 787 was unveiled in July 2007 in Everett, Wash. The first delivery could be pushed back a fourth time, to at least 2010.

By LESLIE WAYNE and MICHELINE MAYNARD

Published: December 5, 2008

he completion date of the Dreamliner, an innovative and high-profile project, has already been pushed back three times. All Nippon Airways, the Japanese airline, will receive its planes first, with other customers not able to take delivery until 2011 or beyond.

This would be nearly two years after the company had expected to begin delivering the planes to airlines, which have rushed to place orders for the fuel-efficient jet. Their enthusiasm had made the Dreamliner the most popular program in Boeing history, with more than 60 airlines placing orders for more than 800 planes.

But high expectations for the aircraft have met with some hard realities, mainly the difficulty of producing a plane that relies on technological breakthroughs, like an airframe made from lightweight composite material instead of aluminum. It also relies on a supply chain that stretches across the globe, as multiple suppliers in many countries are producing the more than four million parts that will go into the plane.

Boeing said it would neither confirm nor deny a setback, which was reported on Friday in The Wall Street Journal. But the senior airline executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for Boeing, confirmed the delay. It is expected that the Dreamliner’s first test flight will not take place until well into 2009.

Yvonne Leach, a spokeswoman for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, declined to comment on the reports of the delay, adding Friday that she would neither confirm nor deny them.

“We’re currently conducting the assessment and it’s not complete yet,” Ms. Leach said. Asked when any decision might be announced, she said: “We don’t have a firm date. We truly have not decided when we are going to announce.”

She added that Boeing would try to notify customers and suppliers 24 hours in advance of a public announcement, although she said that any notification “could come earlier” than that.

News of the possible delay was not unexpected. At first it caused Boeing’s shares to fall in early trading on Friday, but the stock recovered and closed at $39.53, up 34 cents. The shares have fallen by 55 percent since the beginning of the year, hurt by the Dreamliner delays, a two-month strike by machinists and the weakening stock market.

“There has been a lot of buzz out there for some time about the 787,” said Howard A. Rubel, an analyst at Jefferies & Company. “So it is not a revelation that there will be delays with the 787. It’s been clear for a while that a slippage had developed.”

The next-generation jet had faced a number of production setbacks, including the strike by 27,000 assembly workers that shut down Boeing’s commercial aircraft factories for two months earlier this fall. But the larger issues looming over the program are linked to an optimistic timetable promised by Boeing when it first announced the plane, and a series of complicated production problems that the company is seeking to fix.

The Dreamliner, a midsize twin-engine plane, was an instant hit among airlines, which lined up to buy it because of its fuel-sipping engine and lightweight airframe, both of which save on fuel consumption and bills. Since then, however, engineering and production problems have presented one challenge after another.

Many of these issues are chronicled in an internal study by Boeing’s main rival, Airbus. The study, titled “Boeing 787 Lessons Learnt,” was posted Wednesday on Flightblogger, a widely followed aviation Web site.

The problems, some of which have been resolved, concern software glitches, the plane’s titanium wings and the use of low-wage foreign workers in other countries with little aerospace experience. There have been shortages of parts, especially fasteners, and the plane still remains overweight.

“It is very easy not to get everything right,” Mr. Rubel said. “The human challenges in putting this together are beyond belief. What’s causing the delay? It’s just been a lot of little things.”

Mr. Rubel added, however, that given the current slowdown in aviation, the fact that the Dreamliner is delayed may be a blessing in disguise because an on-time delivery would have added capacity in an airline system that already has too many planes.
http://www.nytimes.com/