Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [87]
Fears that the celebrations may have been premature were soon confirmed when the company began hinting at a possible slip in first flight to late September 2007, or even beyond. The first official clues emerged in late July, when Boeing President and Chief Executive Officer James McNerney admitted that the company was “slightly behind” on the project and that research and development spending for the year had been cranked up dramatically to $3.7 billion, largely “to preserve the 787 schedule.”
But hints of trouble to come could be traced as far back as mid-2006, when Boeing confirmed that it was slowing down studies of how to ramp up its planned 787 production rate from ten per month to twelve in 2011. At the time, 787 Business Management Vice President Craig Saddler said the study was slowing to ease pressure on suppliers and to give them more time to get their production processes right. “To be honest, they’re a bit tentative,” he said. “We’ve been asking them to do something they’ve never done before. We’re probably better off letting people build parts—their confidence will come way up and I think we’re going to find out we’re in a lot better shape than we thought we were.”
The potential for committing too hastily to new production practices had been exposed by Boeing’s own experiences with the assembly of a flawed composite fuselage barrel section earlier in 2006. Described by Bair as the “infamous barrel that didn’t work,” it led to the development of a new mandrel that was later used to make two new demonstration barrel sections in Boeing’s developmental center. The original problem was caused because the composite mandrel “expanded too much, and rather than redo it, we sent it back to the machine shop, and leak paths developed. We should have thrown it away,” recalled Bair. “This one was flawed going in and we thought we could make it work, but we couldn’t.” The result was bubbles and voids that developed in the composite as it was being wound on the mandrel.
The incident was viewed as a something of a godsend by Strode, who said, “Because of the examination of what went wrong, we could have avoided future problems cropping up in particular factories. I’m not saying we’ve had problems, but this has certainly reduced the chances of it happening in the future.”
There were other worries, too. By mid-2006 a concerted charge was under way to drive out more weight, which in July that year was “around 2 to 3 percent” over target, according to Bair.
Recognizing the growing urgency, engineering resources were brought in from across Boeing “as well as from the supplier partners,” Saddler confirmed. “There are a whole lot of ideas on how we can reduce weight—some of which could cause more testing to be done.” A “war room” was put together, and weight czars appointed for each part of the aircraft. The one comforting factor in all this was that the initial wing assemblies—the center wingbox—from Fuji “came in lighter than predicted, so that makes me feel good.” Only time would tell how misplaced this good feeling was.
The astonishing achievements of the 787 sales team added to the pressure to deliver on time. Firm sales pushed through the 420 mark by mid-September 2006, making it easily the first commercial airliner program to have racked up so many orders before the first flight. But as fall 2006 began in Seattle, Airplane Development and Production Vice President Scott Strode eyed the calendar nervously. “The next three months is the most critical phase for the program because that’s when we begin really building the first article, and activating all the labs and getting the systems going.