Recent Stories with tag dreamliner

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.

As of 10 a.m. this morning, you can take light rail from downtown to the SeaTac Airport in 36 scenic minutes. There's enough space under most seats to stow baggage if you're holding carry-on in your lap. The fare is $2.50 one-way. Here's a photo gallery of our preview trip. (In other transit news, everyone wants a piece of the First Hill streetcar.)

On December 15, 2009, at 10:27 a.m., Boeing's 787 Dreamliner lifted off at Paine Field for a test flight. For three hours, it flew back and forth over the Sound, until increasingly rainy weather called a halt to the flight. Testing will continue for about nine months, and involve three 787s and about a dozen flight crew. Even Ryanair's brinksmanship on its huge 737 order couldn't dampen Boeing spirits.

Other local bidness: Weyerhauser announced it's becoming a real estate investment trust, McDonald's double-dog-dared Starbucks to provide free Wi-Fi, and the Seattle Times triumphed temporarily over death (taxes).

Seattle left last week's record low temperatures behind, and started focusing on eating outside. The Mobile Chowdown will return to Interbay on January 9. City Hall and SDOT are making street-food-friendly noises regarding regulatory changes in 2010, including making it easier for vendors to set up on the outskirts of city parks. We also mistakenly pumped 10 million gallons of sewage into Elliott Bay.

Sports fans had an early Christmas, discovering Husky QB Jake Locker, pitcher Cliff Lee, and hothead Milton Bradley under their tree.

Boeing's 787 Dreamliner lifted off from Paine Field on its maiden test flight this morning. There was live video coverage at all the local networks. The Seattle Times called the takeoff at 10:27 a.m. , for those of making notes in your diary.

There's also this handy real-time flight tracker from FlightAware.

Jilted Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon says, "The decision has been reached." The Seattlepi.com has a few more Boeing details, but the long and the short of it is that Boeing did what everyone expected them to do. The second 787 Dreamliner assembly line will be sited in North Charleston, S.C. Local TV station WYFF 4 is reporting that it will bring 12,000 jobs to the area. Yesterday  South Carolina legislators approved a significant welcome basket of tax breaks and incentives, contingent on Boeing investing $750 million into the area over the next seven years.

UPDATE: Boeing has announced the second 787 assembly line will be sited in North Charleston, S.C.

The Seattle Times says that talks between the Boeing machinists union and management have broken down. Boeing wanted a 10-year no-strike guarantee, and the machinists wanted Boeing to pretend they haven't been planning on moving the second 787 production line to Charleston all along. (It's like no one even listens to the Times editorial board any more.)

Sen. Patty Murray tried to get the two sides to talk today, but it's as if Boeing management doesn't quite have their heart in it.

The South Carolina legislature is busy pushing through a Boeing-sized welcome package that is contingent upon "a business entity" investing $750 million and creating 3,800 jobs. The Times quotes Otis Rawl, chief executive of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce, as saying that those numbers came from "the entity that's looking at the state."

The Times' Jon Talton called this last week: "When Boeing executives announce a second 787 line in North Charleston, S.C., it will be the biggest non-surprise of the year." The second biggest non-surprise of the year, apparently, will be Boeing's announcement that the 787 Dreamliner won't fly before the end of the year. Morgan Stanley is fed up....

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The good news is that if Boeing does announce it's moving more operations to South Carolina, Seattle can expect at least a decade's delay based on the airplane maker's recent performance. Bedeviled to the tune of $1.7 billion in losses on its 747-8 program, Boeing cannot seem to make a deadline stick: "The company unexpectedly announced that the first new 747-8 jumbo jet, slated to fly in November, now won't leave the ground until next year. The postponement contrasts sharply with confident assertions made by the head of the program just six weeks ago..." reports the Seattle Times.

I don't know how sharp the contrast is. Boeing has become the home of confident assertions with a six-week lifespan.

Each time a delay or cost overrun is announced, it sets off a new round of blame-assignation. This time a leading theory is that Boeing diverted its dwindling engineering resources to the vastly more troubled 787 Dreamliner program at the expense of the 747-8. (Any day now I expect to hear that the Dreamliner team...

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