Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [91]
Delays to systems, particularly the flight controls, also loomed. Amid the rollout celebrations, Systems Director Mike Sinnett said the final integration and functional checkout of the systems was “the long pole in the tent” toward clearance for flight testing. Boeing marked systems progress by benchmarking against a common toolset, and software releases known as interface control document (ICD) block points. Having reached ICD block point 6.5 in May 2007, Boeing set 7.2 as the standard required for flight test readiness.
Within weeks of the rollout, it was therefore no great surprise when the inexorable slide in the schedule began. A clue that the problems went deeper than simply missing the first flight target came in August, when Boeing said the fatigue airframe, ZY998, would now arrive before the second flyable 787. The reason, it said, was to give the production system forty to forty-five days to catch up.
In recognition of the coming congestion at Everett, Boeing also took a page out of the Airbus production book to move some completion work off-site. Like Airbus, which used a site in Hamburg to complete its A380s after assembly in Toulouse, it reached agreement with the FAA to use its site at the former Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, to refurbish and modify the first batch of eleven 787s. Early flight test aircraft needed renovating before customer delivery, as well as, in some cases, post-test modifications, and doing this in Texas would relieve the load at Everett. As the production crisis worsened, the number of aircraft planned to pass through Kelly grew, and by early 2008 covered more than twenty.
This is not the image of a lean production line Boeing hoped to see in 2008. As the 787 production crisis deepened, hundreds of extra engineers and mechanics from Boeing and its partners were drafted in to help unravel the mess of traveled work, redo some tasks, replace temporary fasteners, and verify quality assurance. Virtually all the work was supposed to be done by suppliers before parts ever reached Everett. Mark Wagner
On September 5 Boeing finally acknowledged that the flight control software, fastener shortage, and documentation issues had conspired to delay the first flight until at least mid-November, and possibly as late as mid-December. ANA had meanwhile been reassured that delivery was still set for May 2008. Besieged by reporters’ questions, Mike Bair was on the defensive. “We didn’t digitally simulate missing thousands of fasteners. In hindsight maybe we should have been more diligent in looking at that, but it certainly wasn’t something that was on our radar screen.”
Six days later, at a Morgan Stanley investor conference, the chief financial officer for Honeywell admitted that integration of his company’s flight control software into the overall avionics suite had been complicated and had taken longer than hoped. But he also hinted that the blame was not just Honeywell’s. Echoing comments made at the same conference a day earlier by Rockwell Collins CEO Clay Jones, the Honeywell CFO also hinted that problems were linked to Boeing’s delay in finalizing the design. Jones, whose company made the pilots’ controls, said similar definition delays had impacted the delivery schedule.
McNerney also was at the conference and warned that the fastener shortage could pose a longer-term risk for the 787 than previously estimated. Until now, Boeing had said that the fastener issue would be resolved by the time the twentieth aircraft was assembled. “We’re making progress, but it’s still a scramble, if I’m honest,” he said.
Boeing attributed the fastener shortage to industrial capacity issues, blaming a wave of consolidation in the fastener industry several years earlier as well as the surging demand from the booming aerospace sector. The new consolidated firms such as Alcoa, McNerney said, “misjudged” the air transport industry’s rebound after 2004 and failed to invest in new capacity. Bair had earlier said that the fastener industry was “very stretched with the 737 and 777 at record