Boeing Dreamliner is a nightmare

[marmar]

By DAVID KOENIG
AP Airlines Writer


DALLAS — Boeing has stopped test flights of its new 787 passenger jet while it determines what caused smoke in the cabin and forced one of the planes to make an emergency landing.

Boeing Co. shares fell $2.01, or 2.9 percent, to $67.24 in trading Wednesday morning, making Boeing the worst performer in the Dow Jones industrial average.

On Tuesday, a 787 on a 6-hour test flight had to make an emergency landing in Texas after the crew reported smoke in the rear of the plane.

Boeing spokeswoman Loretta Gunter said Wednesday the company will ground its fleet of test planes while technicians analyze data from the stricken plane to pinpoint the cause of the smoke. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2013394242_apusboeingtestflight.html

[gateley]

1. I know - I'm so disappointed. I was very excited about this plane. Another

example of "well, it looked good on paper..." :(

[leveymg]

2. You know this country's in serious trouble when we can't even make airliners, anymore.

That's one of the few things we still do make, that are supposed to be truly competitive on the world market.

We have been truly f-cked by our corporations and banks. Time to take some of them over, and throw a lot of executives in jail.

Enough of this sh-t.

[FinsUpTechGuy]

3. easy

This was a test flight for a reason. This plane will still be a success. Lets not forget that the A380 had some serious issues pop up last week after it has been in the public domain.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

4. And we all thought Airbus was in deep shit with their A380.

Those are cruising along just fine, right? Or not?

[marmar]

5. I think many of them are grounded now because of the engine issues.....

nt

[PBS Poll-435]

6. I believe that they are still grounded by the Kangaroo airline

Something about shit falling off the plane's engines mid-flight.



:P

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

8. Ah, I see. Interestingly, this happened last week.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A380#Incidents_and_accidents

On 4 November 2010, Qantas Flight 32 - an A380 - suffered an uncontained engine failure en route from Singapore to Sydney and was forced to return to Singapore Changi Airport to land. There were no injuries to passengers or crew. Parts of the engine nacelle fell onto the Indonesian island of Batam. Later that day, Qantas announced that their entire A380 fleet would be grounded until the conclusion of an internal investigation taken in conjunction with the engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce plc.

[Blue_Tires]

7. well, it is still in testing mode

so it's not that big a disaster outside of public relations...

some of the insiders on airliners.net believe it was due to some poorly-wired test equipment attacted to the systems that overloaded or whatever...

[sofa king]

9. I'll bet I can guess what it was.

Test platforms almost always suffer from sub-standard wiring, as designers and workers are constantly moving the wiring bus around, and therefore extending and shortening electrical lines. Only a minimal spark can ignite the wiring's insulation, dust bunnies, and anything else flammable.

For most of its existence, NASA has had a "no splice" rule in its manned space flight program. That rule was in effect when CM-012 was delivered to Florida in 1967 for the AS-204 mission tests (later renamed Apollo 1), but because the Apollo program was on a fast track, the capsule delivered had also been previously used as a wiring test-bed, and was full of spliced wires, dust, and clipped insulation. In a 16psi pure oxygen environment (with a hatch held closed by that air pressure), it was only a matter of time before that wiring ignited a fire on the pad which killed Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White.

NASA tried to place the blame on a particular wire that was worn down to the metal by an access panel, but according to a friend of my father who worked on the CM-012, the entire capsule was a violation of manned flight safety standards, and there's no reason to suspect that this particular wire was the cause--it was, according to this fellow, bound to happen.

Edit: I should add that it was probably this incident which galvanized the nation's 500,000 Apollo Project workers into the "it won't happen on my watch" mentality which led to the mission's eventual success. It was upper management which forced CM-012 to go from a testing boilerplate to the first planned manned capsule of the Apollo project. Afterward, they couldn't get away with such cost-and-time saving measures because their own workers would happily report them for the violations. As a result, no Block I CSMs were flown manned, and no more Americans died in the project.

[End Of The Road]

10. Too many components have been outsourced

and when Boeing tries to put them together in the assembly line, they don't always fit together.

Mitsubishi makes the wings
Kawasaki makes the forward fuselage
Fuji makes the center wing box
Saab makes the cargo doors
Alenia Aeronautica in Italy makes central fuselage & horizontal stabilizer
Other parts are made by companies in Britain, France, Germany, and South Korea
And at least 10 U.S. companies contribute various parts

According to a WSJ article from 2007, some of these handpicked suppliers outsourced the work to other companies, and "When mechanics opened boxes and crates accompanying the fuselage sections, they found them filled with thousands of brackets, clips, wires and other items that already should have been installed. In some cases, officials say, components came with no paperwork at all, or assembly instructions WRITTEN IN ITALIAN!!" (Those caps & exclamation points are mine.)

Move forward two years to 2009, and things had gotten better but there were still problems. From a Businessweek article, January 2009: "Suppliers can produce parts precisely to order, for instance, but then when the parts are put into place they may not fit correctly or may require adjustments. When a project is all done under one roof, such changes can be made quickly. But when the supplier is halfway across the globe, changes can take weeks."

I've read somewhere that Boeing is going back to making many of the parts themselves, but I think the early deliveries will be these with the brazillion outsourced parts.

I think they'll get it fixed, eventually. And I'm glad none of the outsourcing was to China.