Boeing's 787 Dreamliner Will `Definitely' Be Postponed, Udvar-Hazy says

[marmar]

By Eric Sabo and Susanna Ray


Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Boeing Co.’s 787 Dreamliner will “definitely” be postponed a seventh time after a test jet caught fire during a flight last week, said Steven Udvar-Hazy, who was once the planemaker’s biggest customer.

“It’s a big setback for Boeing,” Udvar-Hazy said today of the Nov. 9 electrical fire that prompted an emergency landing and forced the company to suspend test flights since.

Speaking in an interview at an airline conference in Panama City, Udvar-Hazy didn’t say when the 787 might be ready to enter passenger service. Udvar-Hazy was Boeing’s biggest customer as founder and chief executive officer of International Lease Finance Corp., which has 74 Dreamliners on order. He retired from the company this year and started another leasing business, Air Lease Corp.

Boeing can’t comment on a potential delay until it has completed an investigation of the fire, which broke out in a power panel under the cabin floor of one of the test jets, said Lori Gunter, a spokeswoman at the Chicago company.

The 787 is running almost three years behind schedule and is due to be delivered to the first customer in the first quarter of 2011. It is the first composite-plastic airliner and uses an all-electric system to save on fuel.


http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ab7Z2NBHkeRE

[GSLevel9]

1. that's REALLY too bad...

it's a great concept from a great manufacturer.

[gateley]

2. I'm so disappointed. nt

[iamtechus]

3. Boeing went outsourcing crazy!

Many of the Dreamliner's problems stem from the fact that Boeing is having various subassemblies for the airplane manufactured by a bunch of different companies in various countries around the world -- including China. As most anyone could have predicted, the result has been disasterous.

The supplier problems ranged from language barriers to snafus that erupted when some contractors themselves outsourced chunks of work. Many of these handpicked suppliers, instead of using their own engineers to do the design work, farmed out this key task to even-smaller companies. Some of those ended up overloading themselves with work from multiple 787 suppliers, Boeing says. The company says it never intended for its suppliers to outsource key tasks such as engineering.

http://www.zimbio.com/Boeing+787+Dreamliner/articles/6/Uh+Outsourcing+Problem

[DainBramaged]

4. I was going to say it too, poor quality control

if you can't demand accountability you can't demand quality.