Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [89]
Temporary and missing fasteners plagued the program from the start. The overstressed fastener manufacturers could not keep pace with the massive volume demands of the aerospace boom of the mid-2000s while simultaneously developing a new set of composite-friendly fasteners for the 787. No amount of paintwork could disguise these telltale signs of the shortage appearing in the skin of ZA001 at rollout. Mark Wagner
Early development issues discovered during experiments with a composite mandrel convinced some suppliers, such as Alenia, that it was best to stick to tried and tested units made from dependable, but extremely heavy, invar. Here a rarely seen exposed mandrel awaits its next set of stringers and skin wrapping at Alenia. Mark Wagner
By year-end it was becoming apparent the 787 program was having to race to reach the finish line. Bair, unwilling to disguise the situation, said “scrambling is a core competency of the Boeing Company,” and confirmed not only that some suppliers were struggling, but also that weight remained a problem to the tune of roughly 2.5 tons. Without pointing fingers, Bair added worryingly, “There are some partners who are going to be late. We know how late they’re going to be.”
Late changes by Boeing also were impacting the systems. In mid-January 2007, the company unexpectedly ditched plans to fit wireless in-flight entertainment (IFE) technology to the 787, but insisted the move to a conventional hard-wired replacement system would not impact either schedule or cost. Systems Director Mike Sinnett said the “hard decision” to reject WiFi IFE was made because Boeing could not get 100 percent agreement from countries around the world to allocate frequencies in the IFE system’s 5-gigahertz operating bandwidth. In addition, concerns were raised about the ability of the wireless technology to reuse the same frequencies for multiple uses, and for it to keep pace with the expected volume of seat-back content. The only good news was that the change saved more than one-hundred pounds in weight.
News of the change coincided with an analyst’s report saying that some 787 customers had been told their aircraft deliveries could slide. Boeing immediately denied the Wachovia Capital Markets report and said, “There are no delivery delays in 2008 and we are still scheduled to meet entry-into-service in May 2008.” The first flight, it insisted, remained on track for the end of August 2007.
Meanwhile, unknown to most of the outside world, the traveled work problem crept over the Everett production system like an unstoppable tide. Having been designed to integrate large-scale sub-assemblies, it was simply not geared up to absorb the extra work that began to show up at its door with every Dreamlifter flight.
Many of the first structural subassemblies arrived as virtually empty shells and needed to have systems installed, while the shells themselves were frequently covered with marks, or pieces of sticky tape, to indicate defects that required fixing. The first nose Section 41, for example, was delivered from Wichita without many of the avionics and flight deck systems installed. To make matters worse, parts were arriving held together with red-painted temporary fasteners, reflecting an industrywide shortage that was to have a particularly debilitating effect on the embryonic 787 production system.
On arrival, each temporary fastener had to be drilled out and replaced with a permanent one. This was time-consuming and complicated because the paperwork trail for each part was often written in the original non-English languages of the cosmopolitan supply base. Translations were supplied, but Boeing workers worried that errors could easily be introduced. Furthermore, replacing fasteners sometimes caused local damage to the composite structure,