Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [29]
ANA’s $6 billion launch order for fifty 7E7s was announced on April 26, 2004, and included an unspecified mixture of short-range and baseline, longer-range versions. Earlier that month Boeing also once more revised its naming convention, the 7E7-300X or baseline, becoming the 7E7-8, to reflect the eight thousand nautical miles plus range capability. The shorter-range version, formerly dubbed the 7E7-300SRX, now became the 7E7-3 to reflect its three-thousand-nautical-mile optimized-range design as well as its three-hundred-seat capacity. The stretch, formerly the 7E7-400X, became the 7E7-9 by default. Mark Wagner
It was the largest launch order in Boeing commercial history and covered an unspecified mixture of 7E7-3s and 7E7-8s, with deliveries of the latter version beginning in 2008. The 7E7-3 variant was to be certificated about six months later, while the timeline for the 7E7-9 indicated entry into service no earlier than 2010. Crucially, ANA still had to decide on the engine supplier, but Boeing confirmed that a four-month gap would be planned between certification of whichever became lead engine and the second engine.
The expected delivery rate at this stage indicated eight per year to ANA, but already the sheer amount of market interest was giving Boeing worrying signs that it would simply not be able to keep pace with demand—at least not to start with. “There is a limited number of aircraft in the first couple of years, and we are looking at a lot more activity than we have the capacity to produce,” Bair said prophetically at the time.
Gambling on its new production system capacity to ramp up in record speed, Boeing was optimistically offering up to ninety-two delivery positions to the end of 2009. How dangerously overconfident this was, and how expensive the true ramp-up would ultimately prove to be, would only become apparent more than three years later.
By the Farnborough Air Show that year, however, Boeing’s mood was remarkably upbeat about the 7E7, which was on track for design freeze in July 2005. Media interest was intense, and even the slightest changes in the design became talking points at the event. These included a small extension of the 7E7-8 wingspan by 4 feet, to 197 feet, while the 7E7-3 wing now sported more prominent winglets. High-speed lines had also been refined to generate an overall aerodynamic efficiency improvement of about 6 percent. Boeing chose the final configuration after “literally hundreds” of iterations had been reviewed using computational fluid dynamics. Part of the gain was due to the inherent design flexibility of composites. “The span is near that of the 777, but the wing is thinner and so is the wingbox, which is fine because composites allow you to do things that you could not do with aluminum,” explained Bair.
In spite of the changes, the overall appearance was still “different” and in keeping with what Bair described as the goal of “having 99 percent of the public saying, ‘hey, that’s a 7E7.’” However, for the first time Bair acknowledged that the distinctive shark-fin tail would be “less dramatic” than the artist impressions. He still hoped traces would be visible in the rudder with what he dubbed a “hint of a reverse curve.”
The nose retained its conformal streamlining, and the flight deck also kept the four-pane windshield of the artist’s rendering in place of the more traditional Boeing six-pane design. This time the window numbers and design were driven more by potential weight savings and safety than sex appeal. “We’re not going to compromise efficiency just to make it look cool,” affirmed Bair.
Although externally identical, the composite airframe of the newly named 7E7-3 would be strengthened to handle around 2,300 cycles (each being a takeoff, cruise, and landing) per year, more than three times the duty required of the 640 cycles per year of the 7E7-8 and the 7E7-9. Spacing between the 30 percent larger windows was restricted more by provision for space for systems wiring than by the traditional structural dictates