BOEING-787-DELAY
Boeing Co. said Tuesday that its star-crossed 787 Dreamliner had another setback that will again delay its first flight and first delivery.
The Dreamliner, already running about two years late, was due to take wing by next week. However, those plans are on hold after Chicago-based Boeing discovered in testing the aircraft’s structure last month that it needed to reinforce areas where the wings are joined with the main fuselage.
“We are all anxious to see this airplane fly,” Scott Carson, chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said Tuesday. “But it’s important that it fly when it’s ready to fly.”
Boeing had left little room in its testing schedule to fix systems or structural flaws and still deliver the first 787 to All Nippon Airways by March 2010 as promised.
That delivery will happen later, but Boeing won’t outline a new timetable until it figures out how to incorporate the fix into its production schedule, company officials said. It also could not say whether the delays would affect other customers of the jet, which has garnered about 860 orders.
The 787 is the first large jetliner with a fuselage made largely of super-hardened plastic rather than metal.
Boeing has struggled with the aircraft’s design and production. The plane was slated to fly in fall 2007 and to be delivered to All Nippon in May 2008.
The latest problems came to light about a month ago. Engineers found that the structure could not handle the stress loads as computer models had predicted where the plane’s wings join its body.
Boeing will need to reinforce 18 areas, each an inch or two long, on both sides of the plane. Officials called the fix relatively easy and think they can retrofit the parts on completed aircraft.
CEO Carson had repeatedly vowed that the 787 would take its first flight by the end of the month. He said the decision to delay the program indefinitely was made Friday after additional testing confirmed the structural flaw.
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