Boeing’s Very Bad Day – Moon of Alabama

June 24, 2009

Boeing’s Very Bad Day

Not one of my usual themes for MoA but anyway:

Boeing announced today that it will delay the first flight of its new 787 Dreamliner. The reason is – again – a weakness in the 'wing box.' This is the crucial part of the plane where the wings connect to the fuselage and where the weight of the plane's body is transferred onto the wings. The 787 is the first major commercial plane ever to use a wing-box that is:

totally manufactured out of non-metal composite material ('baked' carbon-fibers).
manufactured by someone else than that plane's construction lead. (Boeing outsourced the wing box manufacturing to Mitsubishi Industries and Fuji Industries in Japan.)

The sales argument for the 787 is less weight and thereby less fuel consumption than competing planes. The sales/marketing demand led to efforts to decrease the material thickness of elements of the already lightweight composite wing box.

Apart from the difficult cultural communications between the individual partners of a highly complex part of a plane the composite material stuff is problematic for other reasons too. We pretty well know how various metals behave under stress. Humanity has used metals for thousands of years. With composites things are different. While metal bends before braking, composites tend to break with few warning signs before doing so. We have yet to find the right formulas and parameters to model composites through virtual computer load tests

Airbus (disclosure: I worked for them as IT consultant until recently) screwed up with the A380 development because of different IT CAD systems in Toulouse and Hamburg, its two main engineering sites. Hamburg engineers constructed electrical wiring that was impossible to fit into the structural body Toulouse had constructed and for other system parts it was just vice versa. That was an expensive mistake made because of incompatible data models but still those mistakes were never crucial to the basic plane layout and structure.

Boeing has a bigger problem. They planed and sold a plane (An amazing total of 863 options even while the first one has yet to take off) that is likely structural unsound or will need so much additional 'stiffening' that it will be non-competitive in weight and fuel consumption. Boeing now will add, again, metal stiffeners to the wing box or wings, i.e. additional aluminum structures that can carry the forces the composites as planned before obviously can not. This of course will increase the weight and lessen the fuel efficiency of the 787. The retraction of orders and the penalties to be payed for still pending orders but delayed delivery will be very severe.

Today Boeing got hit from three sides. At last weeks Paris air show the Boeing CEO emphasized that the first 787 flight would be on target with the already four times moved schedule. Today Boeing had to retract that and moved the schedule again. Also today a GAO report showed that the military Boeing V-22 Osprey did not at all perform to the announced parameters and a Congress man asked the Pentagon to stop new orders for the system. Additionally the Pentagon today officially shut down the Future Combat System, a multibillion racket that Boeing as lead contractor had hoped to feast on.

Meanwhile Airbus just delivered the first plane from its new A320 assembly line in China. That move will help to sell the plane there and will transfer some manufacturing knowledge to China. But the essential engineering and production knowledge will still be kept in Europe. To assemble is not to create.

Meanwhile Boeing's attempt to offshore a central construction and production piece to Japan is not going well at all.

I wonder how significant this may be in the long term.

Posted by b on June 24, 2009 at 19:32 UTC | Permalink

Comments

damn shame about Boeing, they broke ground with the 777 by getting good requirements from future customers and designing the airplane completely with computers. it was a quite successful jet. Now however, I prefer to fly Airbus, they are quieter and nicer I think. Not sure where they went wrong. Losing all that pork with the Air Force Tanker project probably really hurt them as they had become too used to feeding off the federal teat.
As a former aircraft mechanic I have a lot of admiration for the aerospace industry. there are some outstanding examples of beautifully done milled or cast pieces. the fan blades of a large turbo fan engine are things of beauty and capable of eating small birds without shredding the engine….Canada geese on the other hand will still take them out. The fighters I worked on are very much like formula 1 cars, the cutting edge of technology and about the only thing that will thrill a F1 driver is a ride in an F-16 or Tornado.
Yet, the Airbus 380 had a lot of trouble, I remember talking to an engineer working on the project who told me that it was still 20 tons too heavy. I asked him if it was too heavy to fly and he said “certainly not, it can fly just fine. it only cannot take off or land”. Boeing has to get the weight down, composites are used a lot in modern aircraft and can be stressed. I don’t believe they are so brittle that they either hold or break.
If the US loses its ability to manufacture aircraft, we might as well just give up. we will be left with cleaning each others houses or serving each other hamburgers.
Al Gore had a great idea when he and Billy started the first Clinton admin, he wanted to harness all the great aviation technology and use it to create s super car, a very light, strong, safe, and exceptionally fuel efficient car. There were no takers and everyone laughed at him. well, now we have no car industry and the aviation industry is about to go under too.
the Osprey is wanted by no one other than Congressmen in the areas where it is built. It has killed more Marines than hostile fire has in the last few years. The project has been killed many times before.

Posted by: dan of steele | Jun 24 2009 20:31 utc | 1

“Boeing V-22 Osprey did not at all perform to the announced parameters…”
You may know that the Osprey has been a Boeing cash-sucking project since the early 60s. It was originally designed as a small tilt-rotor plane, and the concept looked promising. Washingtonians demanded that it be BIGGER to carry troops, weapons; the designers knew that the concept can’t work beyond a certain small size, but were overruled by the money men.
So all these years (about 50 of them!)and billions were spent on a technically unworkable project, and it isn’t exactly dead yet; I mean it is still sucking cash although it can never be fully operational.
I understand that the tanker project was another boondoggle. Some of these military expenditures are really ridiculous, even if the objective is more bang-for-the-buck, which it isn’t. It is more bucks-for-boeing.

Posted by: rapt | Jun 24 2009 22:01 utc | 2

dan of steele, I thought the USMC had destroyed the Osprey after losing, oh, twenty-some marines in training exercises.
If the marines can’t finish off the Osprey, who can? I bet we see another, equally lethal and useless, iteration within the next ten years.

Posted by: alabama | Jun 25 2009 1:46 utc | 3

787 blowup is a COLOSSAL mis-management poster child that MBAs will study forever, and former Boeing executives will still rake in six figures as their professors. Why are these gross incompetents, at Boeing, on Wall Street, in WA DC, not getting fired!!!??? Wing root failure!? Discovered just before final rollout!? Are you kidding me!!!????
The carbon fiber mandrels were fabricated! The fabrication and oven procedures were all written! The subcomponents all dimensioned! They have to go back to square one!!
To hear it told by Boeing insiders, this is it! This is their ‘Great Sucking Sound’!

Posted by: Babel Fish | Jun 25 2009 2:53 utc | 4

Just a note but I often see the Osprey flying around here in southeastern NC. I know there have been a lot of crashes but I have no knowledge whether it can be or has been made to take-off, fly or land safely. If it hasn’t, then putting these young service people at so much needless risk is more than shameful.

Posted by: Rick | Jun 25 2009 3:28 utc | 5

Technical details of the likely not-so-small problem: Understanding the 787 structural reinforcement (Update1)

Digging deeper, the 18 points in question on each side of the airplane (36 total) are located on the top panel of the center wing box and run port to starboard inside the structure of the center tank through to the other wing. These 18 ‘stringers’ inside the center wing box are matched by 17 stringers on the wing box, which serve to stiffen the wing skin. The wing box has 17 stringers, but a source indicates they are designated 2-18, hence the reference to the 18 points that need to be reinforced.
The composite stringers, which give the wings its longitudinal stiffness, are cured during production when cooked in the autoclave and joined as a single bonded piece with the wingskins.
On the inboard side of the wing box where the 17 stringers end and connect to the center wing box, each has what is known as a ‘stringer cap’ that widens at the end and actually makes the hard connection between Section 11 and Section 12 on the side of body. The stringer caps on ZY997 sustained damage, albeit repairable, when the wings were flexed in late May.
Boeing confirms that small areas of the wing structure separated or “disbonded” from the wing skin, though declined to specify exactly where. Sources directly familiar with the situation say the shifting tension load from the stringer to fastener head also caused damage on the structure.

The real problem is that the computer models did not show the problem only live testing did. So the models or the parameters used in them must somewhat be wrong and need to be corrected. With the then better model the whole plane must be virtually stress-tested again and this could show additional problematic areas.
On the V-22. Only one went down during testing. The problem the GAO report found is reliability. When the V-22’s were in Iraq only 60% were available at any time, 40% were in repair. That’s not a good number. Dan o.S.: What is the A-10 reliability? 85%

Posted by: b | Jun 25 2009 10:05 utc | 6

I will have to look around, I did work on A-10s as well and they are extemely reliable and the hours of maintenance to flying hours is very low compared to old war horses such as the F-4. you can change an engine on an A-10 in about 1.5 hours.
however, I stopped doing that stuff more than 10 years ago so don’t have numbers.

Posted by: dan of steele | Jun 25 2009 10:22 utc | 7

Don’t forget that Boeing functions as much a government entitiy as it is a private corporation. And what sort of efficiency have we learned to expect from the Federal Government?

Posted by: ralphieboy | Jun 25 2009 11:05 utc | 8

I just checked the revenue figures for Boeing for the 1st quarter of 2009: around eight billion from commercial sales and around seven billion from military and other government contract work.
So these guys are as good as socialized.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Jun 25 2009 11:08 utc | 9

I think I left a comment here somewhere in late winter/early spring that there were Ospreys flying around in my neighborhood daily for a couple of weeks. I was told they were eventually headed to Afghanistan.

Posted by: beq | Jun 25 2009 11:13 utc | 10

the thesis of this paper is still mostly correct: boeing’s plan [likely adopted from mcdonnell douglas] for their commercial aircraft segment is to exit the aircraft manufacture business and do only project management. and project management for this group of wingnuts basically entails a bunch of ‘roid raging MBA jocks locking the all the knowledgeable nerds in their lockers. they’re doing a heck of a job.
nasa tried outsourcing it’s knowledge base in the 1990s – “faster, cheaper, better.” it just turned out to be a faster, cheaper, more embarrassing way to fail at the core mission and decimated the research and engineering culture there and severed the organization’s flow of generational knowledge down.
for the u.s. worker, a lot of this has to be considered as mgmt elites’ attack on workers & unions vs. workers’ right & ability to manage their workplace.

Posted by: bengt-åke | Jun 25 2009 19:10 utc | 11

whoops, the alan macpherson (r.i.p.) paper is here: http://www.leeham.net/FileLib/March2005BoeingOutsourcing.pdf
& congrats to airbus & all their associated for finding a middle ground.

Posted by: bengt-åke | Jun 25 2009 19:18 utc | 12

@beq- afaik – the V-22 never deployed to Afghanistan. Most interesting areas in Af are too high for the V-22 to fly there with significant load and it is too difficult to maintain in field conditions.
Like the F-22 – useless crap for a fantasy conflict that will not occur at all.

Posted by: b | Jun 25 2009 20:52 utc | 13

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