Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [1]
Anchoring the meeting was Walt Gillette, a soft-spoken Texan with a reputation for solid engineering over a long career at Boeing stretching back to 1966. Gillette, who in media interviews referred to himself as “older than dirt,” had been involved in almost every Boeing jetliner since the 707. Now he was tasked with steering the company’s aircraft development in a bold new direction and away from the lower-risk, lower-cost derivative approach of the past decade.
Boeing heritage infused Gillette’s blood. He had been brought up on flying tales of World War II from his uncle, a B-17 veteran, and Gillette’s many achievements included a breakthrough installation design that enabled the low-slung 737 wing to be fitted with the high-bypass CFM56 engine. The move transformed the fortunes of the 737, effectively launching it into the history books as the best-selling airliner of all time. Now he was pursuing answers that would help plot Boeing’s commercial jetliner development course for the next fifty years or more.
Since early 2001, Boeing had been courting airlines with an intriguing high-speed design called the Sonic Cruiser. But all the time, Boeing had a “reference model” in its back pocket, a theoretical concept that shifted all the new technology in the Sonic Cruiser from speed to efficiency. The model, dubbed Project Yellowstone, was only meant to be a gauge against which the true advantages of the technology could be judged, but to Boeing’s surprise it started to attract just as much interest as, if not more than, the Sonic Cruiser.
But was this interest real? Were the airlines really more interested in efficiency than the holy grail of higher speed? Of course, times were tough for some carriers after 9/11, but how many wanted efficiency and how many still demanded speed? Boeing had to know, and the huddle on that cold, overcast day on Seattle’s Pier 66 was the best way to find out.
“We’d had a series of meeting with these airlines, and after about three of these gatherings we finally had to know what they thought,” recalled Gillette. In front of the top strategic planners for the top airlines, he drew a graph on a whiteboard. Along the bottom of the graph was range, while the vertical axis was payload. “Some were clearly intrigued by the reference model, and some clearly wanted more speed. There were dots all over the graph,” he recollected.
“We told them this was not a decision meeting, but that Boeing had to decide what to offer,” recalled Gillette, who later viewed the meeting as one of the most productive he ever had. The results were gold dust. After all the airline representatives left, Boeing gathered up the charts and reviewed the results. The airlines were virtually unanimous, and none gave a high rating to Sonic Cruiser’s Mach 0.98 cruise capability, while all gave maximum points to Yellowstone, which had a 20 percent cut in fuel burn relative to a 767. The bottom line was that speed was out and efficiency was in. From now on, the course was set, and the journey toward the Dreamliner had begun.
INTRODUCTION
THE STORY OF THE 787 DEFIES THE IMAGINATION. NOT SINCE THE 1960S AND the heady days of Apollo, Concorde, and the Boeing 747 has an aerospace story captivated such global attention or prompted as much intrigue. News of the project leaked out at the fledgling Sonic Cruiser stage, far earlier than Boeing wanted. But the reaction sparked an unprecedented level of interest that refused to dissipate when the project morphed into the 7E7 and later evolved into the 787 Dreamliner. In a new media world of instant web access, blogging, and twittering, the exposure was almost too much. “It was like working in a gold fish bowl,” former project leader Mike Bair once remarked.
At first the spotlight was kind, and the project’s high-profile technology and innovations basked in the glow of success as record orders poured in. But problems derailed the project, and Boeing’s challenges turned the Dreamliner into an industrial nightmare. The public glare became the frightening