Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [8]
Boeing looked seriously at high-wing designs as part of its NLA study, and closely evaluated the An-124, BAe 146, and the C-17, pictured here. No high-wing super jumbo ever emerged, but the shoestring budget of the exercise sparked a systems supplier revolution that would profoundly impact the 787. One study, named the Model 763-241, was configured with a 69-foot-tall T-tail, a 262-foot span and a length of more than 250 feet. Mark Wagner
The joint Boeing-Japanese JADC new small airplane (NSA) study included a long, hard look at the novel partnership behind the launch of the MD-95, newly acquired in the merger with McDonnell Douglas. Renamed the 717 in 2000, an Air Tran–operated example is seen in company with an Alaska Airways 737 at Everett on the eve of the 787 rollout. Mark Wagner
The obvious focus for the study was the P-2 767 replacement, and the pace was intense. “We had people trapped in that room for eight hours a day or more for the whole of the last part of 2000. I’d never seen anything like it before,” Jackson remembered.
The ninety-day study focused on three main projects, which were code-named after U.S. national parks at the suggestion of Brian Nield, manager of new airplane product development. A conventional, Mach 0.85 cruise speed project took precedence and was called Yellowstone, while another was a high-speed design code-named Glacier. The third was a blended-wing-body (BWB) design inherited with the McDonnell Douglas merger and code-named Project Redwood. “We needed to make sure we weren’t overlooking something,” said Roundhill.
Of the three, Redwood was the most outlandish, essentially a flying wing without a conventional fuselage. “There were questions about potential passenger reaction to not having windows, as well as emergency evacuation,” said Roundhill. Although Phantom Works studies showed the potential for up to a 20 percent improvement in direct operating costs versus late 1990s aircraft, it was simply too far ahead of its time to have meaningful relevance.
Glacier and Yellowstone were different stories, and while Yellowstone became the focus for the Phase 1, which the ninety-day study represented, smaller-scale studies were conducted in parallel on Glacier. The leading role of Yellowstone quickly transformed the ninety-day study into the “Y study.” As this was aimed at the P-2 market, the new product development strategy morphed this into Y-2 to take into account the use of new technologies. In due course the Y term completely replaced the older P nomenclature and extended into other areas yet to be tackled. The 737 replacement thus became Y-1, and the longer-term 777 successor was now called Y-3. There was no Y-4 to replace P-4, as this requirement was considered redundant.
As the festive season approached and the study wrapped up, results from Yellowstone were “terrific,” said Jackson. “We had a lightweight, really good cash-operating cost aircraft, and it was outstandingly financially successful compared to anything we’d looked at over the past umpteen years.” The team laid out a provisional schedule for Yellowstone in the final days before the holiday break, as well as parallel plans for a further exploratory study of Glacier.
The extraordinary Glacier, details of which were to explode unexpectedly into the news in early 2001, was a sleek, futuristic design. It was the brainchild of a small group of designers at Renton who had worked high-speed aerodynamic studies for the recently abandoned high-speed civil transport (HSCT) project. The NASA-led effort sought to develop technology for a Mach 1.5 airliner with up to three hundred seats, or about three times larger than the Anglo-French Concorde, but had run out of money by 1999.
Boeing’s X-32 demonstrator did not win the Joint Strike Fighter competition,