787 Program Review (Part Three)
Part Three of the 787 Program Review ends with Vice President of 787 Development, Mark Jenks as he discusses the competition and contrast of the Airbus A350XWB and the lessons learned on the 787 program.
Part One can be found here and Part Two can be found here.
Comparing The 787 With Another Composite Widebody – The Airbus A350XWB
“If the question is: if Boeing bring out the 7E7 what are we going to do? The answer is nothing. We are very content to stay with our A330-200,” said John Leahy, Chief Operating Officer (Customers) back in late 2003.
Since that time, Airbus has moved on and is developing its first majority-composite built airplane family in the A350XWB, targeting both the upper end of the 787 segment as well as the 777 family. After several program start-stop-restarts, the A350XWB has taken longer to define, although as Jenks explains, Boeing feels that its approach to using composites for the primary structure of the fuselage retains greater benefits than the method employed by Airbus.
“If you back a little in history to the initial Airbus response [to the 787], they had a “no need for anything” to a “warmed over A330” to a composite wing with a metal fuselage to an all composite airplane [in the A350XWB family]. They had a really strange penalised design with aluminium frames and stringers and composite panels which, at one point, the story was somehow that had an in-service reparability advantage – I can never quite understand that!”
“It’s pretty clear that they have kinda inch-bugged their way from “do nothing” “to a warmed over A330” to something that is structurally, in a lot of ways similar to our airplane, with the major exception of not taking the last step to a one-piece barrel.
Now part of that is timing from their perspective – as this thing [A350] inch-bugged along, I don’t really think they had the opportunity to put the large capital in place to do a one-piece fuselage. There’s lots of lead time required to get autoclaves and tape-layers and a place to do a full barrel, so my guess is that they were forced into that [panel approach].
The one-piece design is clearly, clearly superior [to the A350 panel approach] – that’s a big advantage we have. You don’t see it so much in this [Everett] factory, but if you go to our supplier factories and you see a one-piece barrel being built and compare that to the process you see through with a panelised design, this is the way to build airplanes.
I think they’re [Airbus] gonna be saddled with difficulties in terms of performance because having those joints adds weight – it does limit what you can do. Obviously they are coming in later [to market] which, in some areas means they ought to have the opportunity to integrate some later technology in some areas like systems and the natural progression of electronics – we’ve tried to be careful to make our design as such so that we can incorporate things like improved electronics – one of the reasons we went to a more electric architecture is because it has some fundamental advantages of being able to be upgraded and to “move” with the [evolving] technology.”
Of key concern to airlines is the ability to both identify and repair damage to a fuselage exterior on an airport stand, known as “ramp-rash”, whereby vehicles, jet bridges or any number of ground services could potentially hit the airplane. While Boeing has completed various structural tests as part of the certification effort, the litmus test(s) for both the 787 and A350XWB will come when both enter routine airline service.
Jenks then went on to explain that the evolving maturity process for the 787’s construction is reaping dividends for Boeing.
“Generically, they have the advantage of being the second-mover, we’ve got the advantage of being the first-mover and there are advantages in being a second-mover in terms of the technology – in the “big” areas of technology where you “lock” yourself in, where there is a big advantage is back to the one-piece barrel. That’s not something you can change, once you are “there” [with a fuselage design], you’re kinda “there” and this will allow us to take advantage; the tape-laying equipment continues to progress, all the things that are really slick about doing a one-piece barrel just keep getting better and better. You’ve got the basic fundamental benefit of not having those joints in terms of both the weight and cost of the airplane and that’s one area that’s worked out well for us.
They’ve got the advantage of being able to sit back a little bit, they get to look at some of what we’ve struggled with – the things that we have had to work through, I’d have love to have had the benefit of Airbus going through that five years before we did because you learn something from that, just like the Airbus experience on the A380 was useful for us – you learn from what the wider industry is doing.”
With Hindsight Comes The Aim Of Improving The Process
“With 20/20 hindsight, one area that contributed to our scheduled problems upfront was not having a deep enough insight into the sub-tier supply chain. Part of what we’ve done on this program is to give the big partners more responsibility and we’ve learned that in certain areas, despite the fact that they’ve got a more integrated portion of the work statement, we still need to be very engaged in what they do. In particular it relates to sub-tier suppliers because we found that many of our first-tier suppliers share sub-tiers and so without having the insight as the integrator into all of those sub-tier relationships, none of the individual partners could see that.
One of the things we’ve learned is that we will do better going forward and what would have helped going into this program is that we have to really keep a higher level of insight into the details of the supply chain than we initially had and have more involvement in the process with our direct tier-one suppliers and more engagement in terms of the overall sub-tier “map” of the supply chain.”
Countdown To First Flight
With a June 30, 2009 deadline for getting the first 787 into the air, Boeing tells FleetBuzz Editorial.com that the six flight test airplanes will undergo approximately 3100 hours of flight testing.
Assuming first flight occurs on June 30, 2009 and that launch customer All Nippon Airways expects to take delivery of its first 787 in February 2010, Boeing would have around 215 days in which to complete certification. However, in December 2008, Boeing stated that first delivery would be in the “first quarter of 2010.”
Based on a “215-day” schedule, the six flight test airplanes would have to be flying just under 14.5 hours per day, every day to attain certification before February 2010, on the basis that ANA does indeed take delivery in that same month.
Below are the six test airplane designations and the key tasks they will undertake in order to achieve certification:
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ZA002: Systems
Rolls-Royce Trent 1000
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ZA003: Passenger Environment (Full cabin furnishings)
Rolls-Royce Trent 1000
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ZA004: Airplane Performance (Rolls-Royce Engines)
Rolls-Royce Trent 1000
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ZA006: Service “Ready”
General Electric GEnx-1B
Special thanks go out to Mark Jenks for making these recent articles possible - thank you.
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50 comments March 2nd, 2009
