The stark difference between Boeing’s difficult experience with the 787-8 and the smooth progress it has experienced with its three new airplane programs would seem to be no accident. It comes after a fundamental reorganization that saw airplane development segregated from production.
In fact, Scott Fancher, Boeing Commercial Airplanes head of airplane development, conceded during a pre-Paris Air Show briefing in Seattle that the company had underestimated the “power” of the decision two and a half years ago. The subsequent application of design and development processes under a single model reaped more of a dividend than expected.
“It created an environment where we could flow resources seamlessly from development program to development program and engineers wouldn’t have to re-learn a slightly different way of doing things,” explained Fancher. “The other thing it facilitated for us is learning…so when we learn a lesson on the Max, literally within a week, all of our other development programs know about that lesson.”
At the same time Boeing has sharpened the focus on a design philosophy that better accommodates what Fancher called “produceability, maintainability, supportability and performance.” The resulting simplicity allows for re-use and a greater degree of multi-model commonality. For example, the 737 Max, the 787, the 777 and the 767 Tanker all use the same cockpit displays. “That might sound like a small thing, but now I don’t have design teams all re-thinking what kind of display I’m going to get and how I’m going to architect it into the system,” he said. “And think about the ability for Boeing to truly speak with one voice to one display supplier, and for that supplier to know that they’ve got a very stable environment with Boeing to work with.”
Such stability has already manifested itself in the 787-9, which entered service on time last August after minimal development and production disruption. Meanwhile, the 737 Max 8 team has just passed 90 percent of its design tasks, ahead of schedule. The Max 8’s CFM Leap-1B engines, the first of which flew for the first time April 29 on GE’s 747-8 test bed, have performed as advertised, Fancher insisted (in a rebuke of reports to the contrary).
“The airplane is actually performing better than the expectations we set for it, on the engine side and on the airplane side,” he said. Boeing has set an efficiency improvement target for the Max 8 of 14 percent over the 737-800NG, and 8 percent over the A320neo. Schedules call for factory roll out in the fourth quarter, first flight in the first quarter of next year and delivery in mid-2017.
Fancher added that the program retains a three-month schedule buffer, following its announcement at the last Paris Air Show that development had moved ahead of schedule. “We still have three months of float against our customer commitments and we’ll decide whether we’ll release that to the marketplace or not,” he said.
On the 777X, schedule and performance remain “dead on,” according to the Boeing aircraft development boss. So-called watch items include the airplane’s GE9X engines and the composite wing, for which Boeing is building a new 1.3 million sq-ft factory at Everett, Washington.
Despite its extreme length and folding wing tips, the 777X wing traces its design directly from the 787’s composite span, which, according to Fancher, means minimal risk. Since Boeing started designing the airplane it has “refined” certain elements such as the wing fold, with engineers having reduced the parts-count by some 40 percent over the past 18 months.
“The key here is that the design of the airplane has been very stable,” said Fancher. “We haven’t been chasing range, we haven’t been chasing weight, we haven’t been chasing SFC or aero. So since we’ve had such a stable design, our engineers have had the opportunity to refine their thinking about the design to make it more produceable, more maintainable.”
Fancher said the 777X program team will reach firm configuration, or the point at which it starts detailed design, “later this year.” The company plans to deliver the first production airplane in 2020. By then Boeing expects to have seen the 787-10–the stretched, shorter-range variant of the 787-9–in service for some two years.
Carrying some 15 percent more seats than the 787-9 at the same maximum takeoff weight, the -10 will fly up to about 7,000 nautical miles, meaning it will cover 90 percent of all current widebody route structures around the world, by Boeing’s reckoning.
The company’s decision to maintain the 787-9’s maximum takeoff weight in the 787-10 aided its effort to apply commonality traits endemic to the 737 family to a widebody airplane. The resulting 95-percent parts commonality between the two largest Dreamliners means minimal differences in the production of the airplanes, easing the burden on suppliers and “unlocking” productivity and quality in the manufacturing system, explained Fancher.
Now conducting detailed design, the program team will reach 90 percent completion “later this year,” which will be ahead of schedule, said Fancher. “From a performance standpoint, the airplane’s weight, aerodynamics [and] engine performance are all exactly where we need them to be,” he concluded. “We’re seeing no pressure on any of those dimensions either.”