Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [3]
Over the following year and a half, Boeing’s new, large aircraft morphed progressively from baseline 747 derivatives into 747 look-alikes with 777 technology. This suited most of the prospective customers who had baulked at the prospect of sticking with 747-400 technology for the sake of commonality, but they had to pay a price. The adoption of new 777-style features forced Boeing to revise estimated development costs up, to about $7 billion. The price of the 600X rose to a hefty $230 million in projected 2001 dollars, and by this time, with more than a thousand design and systems engineers, the project was reputedly costing the company a staggering $3 million a day.
Aside from suffering “sticker shock,” the carriers potentially most interested in a new super jumbo were distracted by Airbus’s concurrent decision to accelerate development of its A3XX. But there was something else going on. Boeing was seeing first signs of market fragmentation on routes across the Pacific, and with it a weakening of the jumbo trunk-route market. This same phenomenon would come to have a direct bearing on the midsize market and the development of the 787.
Boeing’s December 1996 launch target came and went, and at a board meeting on January 19, 1997, Boeing officially decided to pull the plug on the 747-500X/600X project. The designs had achieved a 10 percent reduction in direct operating costs relative to the 747-400, but “we just couldn’t make a business case for it. The small size of the market meant the money we’d have spent on it, with or without the effect of fragmentation, just did not make sense,” said Boeing’s product strategy and marketing vice president at the time, Mike Bair.
But what did all this have to do with the 787? The answer lay with using advanced materials to fight costs. “During the NLA period, we investigated a lot of advanced technology, including looking at what the impact would be of a large composite wing,” said Jackson. The key to using composites, as the study indicated, was that it allowed the aircraft to be “cycled down” in size. As composites weighed less, lower-power engines were required, and fuel consumption was therefore lower because the overall weight was reduced. This meant that less fuel was required for the same mission, further reducing the overall size of the aircraft and its landing gear, and further reducing weight.
The demise of the 747-500X/600X had two more significant contributions to the destiny of the 787 in coming years. Alarmed at the way the costs of the 747 derivative study had spiraled, Boeing decided to completely rewrite the book on how to develop new products. The “book” was called the Airplane Creation Process Strategy (ACPS) and focused on cost control through the use of new and novel processes. The strategy was directed by Walt Gillette, fresh from his stint as chief project engineer on the 747-500X/600X, and both the lessons learned from ACPS and its leader would come to have a direct bearing on the 787.
Gillette “was focused on the engineering resource and was trying to get our design house back in order after all the issues we’d had,” recalled Roundhill. The driving notion behind ACPS was the “one in ten” vision in which a completely new aircraft could be developed to initial concept level in less than one year, and with an overall projected program cost of less than $10 billion. Development time for new models traditionally ranged