- On Wednesday, the 10th of August 2022, Boeing finally delivered its first Boeing 787 in over a year. Hopefully, that's the end of some troubles that has been going on for Boeing for almost two years now. And what those problems are, and how that might have an effect on the ongoing travel chaos that we're seeing around the world right now, we'll talk about in this video, so stay tuned.
The 10th of August 2022 was a really big deal for Boeing. Now, there have been rumors that Boeing were to be able to resume their delivery of their flagship Boeing 787 for weeks prior, most recently on the Farnborough Airshow, but Boeing hadn't been able to go on out and confirm that officially, because they were still awaiting the final green light from the regulator, the FAA. The aircraft that was finally delivered last week to American Airlines was a Boeing 787-8, which is the shorter version of the Boeing 787 family, and it was delivered from its assembly plant in Charleston, South Carolina, down to Victorville in South California.
Now, this aircraft wasn't exactly new. It was actually completed about a year ago. And American Airlines is expecting eight more 787s to be delivered before the end of 2022.
The production issues that actually stopped the deliveries of the Boeing 787 started back in 2020. And initially, Boeing didn't think that this was going to have any far reaching consequences. Remember, this happened in September 2020, in between waves of the pandemic, where the industry was subject to both national and international lockdowns.
Obviously, the Boeing 787 is a long haul aircraft, and in between these international lock downs, there wasn't really a big need from the airlines to get this new aircraft delivered. In fact, even before this delivery stop happened, some Boeing customers like Qantas, for example, was taking delivery of the 787, and just putting it straight into storage in the desert. Now the way that the aviation industry works is that the airlines only pay a fraction of the cost of the aircraft when they make the order.
They pay the bulk of the money on delivery of the aircraft. And of course, as the COVID 19 pandemic was ravaging the industry, a lot of these airlines they didn't really mind that there was a little bit of delay in the delivery. This just meant that they didn't have to pay this morning up to Boeing.
But of course, for Boeing, this was a big deal. It meant a lot of costs was sitting in these aircrafts that was now sitting in the factory, where they weren't able to actually get the money from them. So this meant that Boeing had all the incentives in the world to try to sort out these production issues as quickly as possible.
And initially, Boeing assumed that this would be a rather quick fix to do. They thought that the issue which I'm going to explain in a second, was isolated to a small part of the aircraft. But in December 2020, it was revealed that this production issue actually affected a much bigger part of the Boeing 787, almost the entire fuselage.
And this provided problems for Boeing because it meant that a much bigger part of the aircraft would need to be inspected, and this is a key issue. And I'll get to why shortly. So what is the actual problem then?
Well, the Boeing 787 is the very latest all new aircraft design coming out of Boeing. And if you remember, back in 2011, when it was first released, there were some early teething issues. Initially, there was some issues with the lithium batteries that were being used, and they needed lithium batteries, because in the 787, the batteries and electrical systems is being used to a much greater extent than in earlier aircraft.
For example, it's replacing some of the hydraulic systems, but also part of the pressurization system. There was also some early issues with the reliability of the engines that were being used. But both of these issues were fixed years ago.
So, if those issues were fixed years ago, and in 2020, the Boeing 787 was actually a a quite mature aircraft design, then what was it that then stopped the deliveries? Well, it turns out that there are actually two different issues that appeared when the Boeing engineer started looking into it. And I'll tell you all about the details of this after this short message from my sponsor.
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So, the first problem was that the Boeing 787 was one of the very first aircraft to utilize a full carbon fibre fuselage design, and it was the very first wide body. The fuselage is made from barrel sections of carbon fibre that are then bonded together. And it was the accuracy of those bonds that was the first issue.
Dominic Gates, who is a fantastic aviation reporter for The Seattle Times, first reported about these misalignment issues in September 2020. And it was Boeing themselves that reported these issues to the FAA. When these carbon fibre barrel sections are to be bonded together, they are aligned using lasers.
And during this alignment, there might be some small gaps that the engineering team needed to eliminate. The laser guidance computers would show exactly how big these gaps are, and then the engineering team is supposed to use purpose-built shims in order to fill these gaps perfectly. But what Boeing found was that these shims that were being used, were not of the correct size.
One feature of the software that the engineers were doing was built to warn engineers if a shim was too big, but it turns out that that part of the software was not being used properly. And the next issue that was found was the smoothness of the interior skin of the fuselage. Now, in this case, this smoothness is a little bit relative, because the limits that the Boeing engineers were working with are really, really small.
The highest permissible value near some of these joints was a non-smoothness of 0. 005 inches, or 0. 127 millimeters.
So, it's very, very tiny. But still, it has to be within limits. Now, on its own, any of these two problems is not really an issue.
But when they were combined together, it could become a bigger deal. So Boeing did what they should, they reported it to the FAA. And initially, they thought that this was something that was isolated to only a few aircraft.
Eight of the aircraft that had already been delivered to customers were grounded when this was found out, and Boeing together with the FAA started digging deeper into the problem. Now, to be absolutely clear, Boeing have said numerous times and did say last week as well on the delivery, that these issues that I've just been talking about, were not of an immediate flight safety concern. That is also true for some of the other issues that I'm just about to discuss.
Another factor in this story is that at the time that these problems were revealed back in 2020, Boeing was assembling their 787 in two different sites. Now, that is not unusual at all. Airbus, for example, have many different assembly sites around Europe and even in the United States.
But Boeing thought that these production problems was isolated to only one of these two sites. The smaller Boeing 787s, the 787-8 and 787-9, they were put together in Everett in Washington States. And the bigger, the 787-10, was put together in Charleston, South Carolina.
Boeing thought that these problems were only isolated to aircraft that was coming out of the Charleston site, but as the FAA started digging deeper into this, they basically found that they were unhappy with the production from both sites. In October 2020, Boeing announced that they were going to consolidate the operation and production of the Boeing 787 to its Charleston site in South Carolina. This was part of a cost cutting drive that Boeing was doing in the wake of the grounding of the 737 Max, and it also included the selling and the stopping of leasing of several buildings, especially in Washington State.
In any case, Boeing and its engineers worked furiously on trying to solve these problems, and in March 2021, it looked like everything was back under control when the deliveries of the 787 started with the first aircraft to United Airlines. However, that wouldn't last for very long because in May 2021, just a few months later, FAA once again stepped in and stopped the deliveries of the 787. This time, it had to do with the FAA not being entirely happy with the way the Boeing was proposing to check for flaws in already produced 787s.
Boeing believed that they had identified the cause for these bonding issues and because they knew the cause, they could use an analytical program to kind of identify which areas of the aircraft where these flaws were most likely and eliminate other parts. Of course, they wanted to do this because checking every single joint in the fuselage is extremely expensive, especially on already produced aircraft where they needed to remove the cabin in order to get access to the joints. But the FAA stated that they needed more time in order to evaluate the data that Boeing was providing and check that this process was actually good enough, and they ended up rejecting the process altogether until Boeing made some changes to it.
A few months after the delivery stopped in 2021, Boeing received some further headaches associated with the Boeing 787. And those headaches involved a further check needed for the forward pressure bulkhead, the door frames, and some suspect titanium parts that had been delivered. Fortunately, these issues were isolated to only a few Boeing 787s that were provided, and these were easily identified.
Right now in August 2022. Boeing has about 120 787s that's sitting in storage awaiting to be checked and then getting prepared for delivery. And it's worth noting that even though production stopped in Everett, back in 2021, there's still a lot of already finished Boeing 787s that's sitting on the ground there waiting for delivery.
And that's why Boeing has retasked a lot of its personnel that it had employed up there from producing aircraft into checking these aircrafts prior to delivery. Finally, on the 8th of August 2022, FAA said that they now thought that all of the Boeing processes met the certification standard that they required, and Boeing could officially start delivering the Boeing 787 again. But this doesn't mean that it's all smooth sailing for Boeing from here, because for the time being, the FAA have decided that they are going to pre-check the production quality of every single Boeing 787 that are to be delivered.
This is different from the system that they used to have with Boeing, where certain Boeing employees had been given the authority from the FAA to do that final production check. That used to be a much smoother and quicker procedure, but for the time being, the FAA have decided to dedicate their own personnel to doing this job. But you might be asking yourself, what about all of the other Boeing 787s that are out there flying right now?
Well, like I mentioned before, eight of those were grounded due to those secondary quality effect. And for the rest of the fleet, both the FAA and all of the other licensing authorities out there, says that these issues are not really a flight safety risk. And because of that, when these aircraft comes in for their regular major maintenance checks, probably D checks, then Boeing has put together a program to check for these issues and possibly rectify them then.
So they will continue to fly according to their normal schedule. The new aircrafts that are being produced right now do not have these bonding issues. And that's because Boeing changed its production processes to eliminate the problem.
But that still leaves about 120 aircraft that are still on the ground, awaiting checking, and then delivery to customer. And like I already mentioned, these inspection takes a lot of time and resources to do. And since now both Boeing personnel and FAA personnel is involved, it's going to be interesting to see at what rate Boeing can continue to deliver this aircraft out to customers.
And that pace of delivery is actually really, really important because we're not in 2020 anymore. Now, the airline customers out there are no longer happy to wait for their wide-body deliveries, they need those aircraft because people are starting to travel. And in some cases, they're traveling even more than they did back in 2019, prior to the pandemic.
Now, I've already done a video about the travel chaos, which you can check out up here. But that travel chaos is mostly down to lack of personnel both on the behalf of the airport and the airlines. But lack of aircraft is going to become a bigger and bigger issue.
And that's because you might remember that during the pandemic, a lot of the airlines were retiring their older, less efficient aircraft types. And the idea was that if and when the demand would start bouncing back, well, then they would be able to use their new generation, more efficient aircraft types, which the Boeing 787 is. So all of those Boeing 787s that are awaiting delivery, are going to be soon sorely needed by the industry.
Prior to the pandemic, Boeing was delivering as many as 14 Boeing 787s per month, which is a huge number for wide body jets. But now sources like Jon Ostrower from The Air Current are predicting that after these first few deliveries, the delivery pace is going to slow way down again, because of the issues that we've just mentioned. And I think that a lot of industry insiders are looking very closely the next couple of months at how well Boeing is keeping up their delivery schedule.
So far, these 787 problems has cost Boeing as much as $5. 5 billion, with a B, and that's, of course, a lot of money that Boeing needs to scrape back somehow, which is going to be hard to do if the delivery process drags out further because they are then going to potentially have to pay more money to its customers for delivery delays. But Boeing is likely hoping that the 787 is going to receive a lot of new orders now when they can resume delivery again, similar to what happened to the Boeing 737 Max after its ungrounding.
But we're going to have to wait and see what happens. So what do I think about this then? Well, a big part of me really hopes that Boeing will get a lot of new orders for the Boeing 787.
I have a lot of friends who fly the aircraft, and they say that it is a fantastic, efficient, quiet, nice aircraft. It's very comfortable to fly in, I've flown in it myself. And it is the future for the aviation industry.
Not only the 787, but the Airbus A350, and these new type of aircraft. Also, I feel that Boeing did exactly what they were supposed to. They found out an issue in the production, they notified the FAA about it, and then they took the time needed in order to find, rectify, and check all of the aircraft.
This is the way that the aviation industry is supposed to work, and I personally is really looking forward to get myself on to a 787 and go out traveling and maybe see you guys in the near future. So, what do you guys think? Put your comment in the comment section below and remember to subscribe to the channel if you like this kind of content.
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