The 787 Dreamliner is Boeing’s most innovative plane yet, not least because it is the first airplane which has a fuselage made out of composite material rather than aluminium sheets riveted together. It’ll be light and fast – and its Rolls-Royce and General Electric engines will emit 20% less co2 than similarly-sized planes do today, Boeing insists.
Boeing 787 Becomes The First Composite Airliner To Fly
Following its first flight in December 2009, half a dozen Dreamliners have been criss-crossing the skies over Seattle, conducting continual flight tests. This weekend, the aircraft is set to land at Farnborough in England for its first appearance at the Farnborough air show where it is anticipated to be the main attraction.
Manufacturing any aircraft is definitely an incredibly manual process that requires great skills – a great deal more so than car production, in particular, where robots are utilized extensively. But in the case of the Dreamliner, the challenges are greater than normal.
The laborers here have had to familiarise themselves with numerous new technologies, ranging from complicated electrics to new materials. They’ve also had to have difficulty both with poor logistics management and with parts shortages, resulting from Boeing’s bungled effort to outsource much of the job to external suppliers. Probably the biggest issue they have had is getting their suppliers and supply network to be on the same page,thereby making sure that the work carried out by the suppliers is done on time.
Unfortunately for Boeing despite all their efforts to solve these issues for months now, the problems are certainly not going away. In June, Boeing found that tail parts on some Dreamliners hadn’t been properly fitted, a mistake which could take eight days per airplane to fix. As such a lot of of the 787 was outsourced, there might be other components embedded deep in the plane that might need to be checked too. Boeing simply cannot keep having issues like this appear every couple of months – the cost of production slow-downs and even pauses will cut into the programs profitability.
