The Real Dangers of Boeing’s 787 Test Flight

by Michael van Baker on December 23, 2009

It’s like a Bizarro-world “Gung Ho”!

It’s not the landing gear or brakes–Boeing has eight and a half months to get all the kinks worked out of the 787 Dreamliner mechanically, and test pilot Randy Neville probably enjoyed trying a 2-g pull. They have just begun trying to break things. No, the truly scary “test flight” that Boeing is on is global outsourcing: not because it might fail, but because it might succeed.

Over at the Harvard Business Review, blogger Dick Nolan (Boeing Philip M. Condit Professor of Business Administration at the UW’s Foster School of Business) thinks Boeing’s Trojan Horse moment was in outsourcing that famed Boeing know-how. Writes Nolan, “Before the 787, Boeing had retained almost total control of airplane design and provided suppliers precise engineering drawings for building parts (called ‘build to print’).”

Not that that has changed entirely–ironically enough, here’s this recent headline from the Wall Street Journal: “Boeing takes control of plant.” But that’s a South Carolina plant. For the 787, Boeing has constructed 300-partner supply chain that spans the globe.

Continues Nolan:

Boeing effectively gave Tier 1 suppliers a large part of its proprietary manual, “How to Build a Commercial Airplane,” a book that its aeronautical engineers have been writing over the last 50 years or so. Instead of “build to print,” Boeing provided suppliers with performance specifications for parts and components and collaboratively worked with them in the design and manufacturing of major components such as the wing, fuselage section, and wing box.

The only problem is that once Boeing has trained and retooled its far-flung suppliers, it will have planted a worldwide crop of competitors. China, Nolan thinks, is the most likely to run with the commercial airplane ball. Airbus has already agreed to a Chinese final-assembly plant, work that it, like Boeing, has tried to keep “stateside.”

So forget South Carolina: Asia’s lower-paid workforce is learning from the best how to build a plane from nose to tail, and how to put it together and sell it for about fifteen percent less (per Nolan) than Airbus or Boeing. It’s a fait accompli, a matter of when, not if.

Filed under Business
  • eric burns

    Well, that sounds all very nice, but has one big snag that navel gazing Americans never consider, obsolete measurements! Only three countries on this globe haven’t managed to join the metric world and America is one of them. It is the only industrial country that still uses cumbersome medieval measurement units. If the Dreamliner outsourcing debacle to a metric world signalled anything to Boeing it should have been the fact that being the odd man out is a multi billion dollar luxury that no well run business should put up with. China will not work with medieval measurement units, as computers show nor should it. Airbus, Boeings opposition, is again kilometres ahead with using the worlds only understood measurement language. Sadly, America’s insistence to stick with its hodgepodge of disjointed measurements points to a much deeper malaise than metrology in that country.

  • Greg

    About the previous comment, which measurement system is used is irrelevant!

  • eric burns

    No it is not if it costs you billions of dollars because nobody understands what your measurement anachronism. You are still navel gazing!

  • Brian Utley

    Which system is not an issue any more. For years in engineering and manufacturing everything has been dual dimensioned and computers have eliminated any overhead associated with the practice.

  • eric burns

    This is pure wishful thinking. According to some studies it costs US industry and the people approximately 1.27 trillion dollars per year to use dual measurements. See:
    http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/CostOfNonMetrication..

    The irony is that America cannot function properly without metric measurements. So, why force children to waste precious time to learn a hodgepodge of disjointed medieval units that only 3 countries still use on this globe? The US, Myanmar (Burma)
    and Liberia. The last one is in the process of switching to metric, as are Canada and Britain.

  • Tom Wade

    Really ? Tell that to Lockheed, whose stupid use of inches rather than millimeters in a joint project cost Nasa the Mars Orbiter.

  • EggMonkey

    Actually the fault was using both measures rather than it being imperials fault.

  • Martin Vlietstra

    I have been told that many American products get a bad name because of things like non-metric screw threads. Locals cannot get non-metric screws so they use the closest metric equivalent which shortens the product’s life.

  • Michael Payne

    Reference EggMonkey comments. You hit the nail on the head, it’s using two systems of measurement that cost money, this is what the US does presently. You can design a wing joint with 200 precisely drilled holes in inches, ship it overseas and have them use metric which the computer will adjust to millimeters, however choose how many decimal places to use, then extrapolate that minute difference over 200 holes and you have something that will not fit! Big problem!