777X Changes Force Boeing to Relearn Hard Lessons

Boeing has more than 30 777-9 airliners built and stored at its production facility in Everett, Washington. Some have been stored since 2020 with years of testing and certification delays pushing deliveries to next year. However, every stored aircraft must undergo change incorporation first to meet FAA standards, a process that involves years of scrutiny, system updates, and fixes identified during testing.

CEO Kelly Ortberg, responding to a question on the first-quarter 2026 earnings call, provided a high-level overview of the challenges Boeing faces with the the 777X program.

“Change incorporation is basically for the airplanes that we have built, [we must] incorporate all the changes that have happened since they’ve been built. Things that result from the certification program, and things that happen as a result of productivity improvements or process improvements,” Ortberg said. “We go back in, and we incorporate all those changes before we make the delivery. It is a pretty massive activity that we have underway.”

There is a dedicated team within Boeing Commercial Airplanes focused on incorporating changes into the airplanes. Roughly 30 777s will go through this change incorporation process over several years.

“It depends on when the airplane was built,” Ortberg continued. “The older the airplane, the more change incorporation and the more structural-related changes that are needed, and they’ll take longer. The newer the airplane, it’s likely more minor upgrades. Each airplane has a different change incorporation work scope. That’s what the team is doing right now, going through defining the statement of work.”

Ortberg said Boeing will bring all the airplanes down to a common configuration level and then incorporate the changes. “We think that’s going to be the most efficient way. This isn’t new. This is something we’ve always planned. It’s a part of the production process. Unfortunately, when you build the airplanes early to get all the learning, in order to make the final delivery, we have to bring them all up to the latest configuration. It’s in our operating plan, and we’re in the early stages of that change incorporation effort.”

The incorporation of changes to address the gaps between fuselage barrels on the 787, discovered in 2020, took three to four months per airplane. Previous changes to the 737 Max narrowbody took “longer than it took to build them,” former CEO David Calhoun said. Before the Max crisis, it took about 10 days to assemble a 737.

From a 30-airplane cockpit rework crisis on the 767 to a supplier-driven configuration mystery on the 787, the history of Boeing’s pre-production change incorporation process is a master class in what happens when an industry’s best practices are forgotten in the name of financial engineering. Getting it right the first time and avoiding time-consuming, costly rework are crucial for Boeing’s future airplane programs—and its long-term financial recovery.

What ‘Change Incorporation’ Entails

When Boeing builds an entirely new type of airliner, the factory does not wait for regulators to complete their final review before rolling jets off the assembly line. Assembly of pre-production aircraft begins months or years before the FAA issues a type certificate. There is a powerful economic logic driving this decision. A new commercial jet program represents an investment of billions of dollars, and every month that passes between the start of certification flight testing and the first revenue-generating delivery is a month of continued capital consumption with no return.

The practical consequence of that economic pressure is straightforward: Boeing starts building customer aircraft well before the design is finalized. Flight tests expose aerodynamic surprises, systems integration problems, and structural issues that demand fixes. The aircraft being assembled in those early production positions will almost certainly differ, sometimes substantially, from the final certificated configuration when the type certificate is issued. This is not a failure of planning. It is the unavoidable outcome of a complex certification program overlapping with an industrial-scale production ramp-up.

The gap between “what we built” and “what we certified” must be closed before any aircraft can be delivered. The structured, documented process for doing so is called change incorporation—in its purest form, a rigidly controlled disassembly and reassembly campaign. Engineers define which parts must be added, removed, or exchanged on each pre-production airframe to ensure conformity with the finalized, certified configuration. Because virtually no two pre-production aircraft are built in exactly the same configuration, change incorporation is the invisible connective tissue between the flight test program and first delivery.

767: Crisis as Crucible

To understand why the earlier Boeing 767 program produced a massive change-incorporation effort, you first have to understand the political and engineering battle over its cockpit, still being fought even as the first aircraft were rolling down the assembly line in Everett.

Large civil transport jets historically required a three-person flight crew: a captain, a first officer, and a flight engineer. By the late 1970s, when Boeing was designing the 767, advances in avionics automation had changed the equation. Computer-driven systems monitoring, electronic alerting, and centralized digital displays meant that a widebody could be designed for a two-person crew without degrading safety. Boeing and most airline customers badly wanted the two-crew configuration—the labor cost differential compounded into millions of dollars per jet per year across a fleet.

The result was a compromise that became a manufacturing nightmare. The early 767 production aircraft were built with three-crew cockpits. When the FAA finally granted permission in July 1981 for the 767 to have two pilots—roughly 11 months before the scheduled first delivery—approximately 30 aircraft were already in various stages of production. Boeing established a dedicated modification line to upgrade the cockpits of the pre-production aircraft to the two-crew standard.

This was not a minor adjustment. The three-crew cockpit had a full flight engineer’s panel with hundreds of gauges, switches, and indicator lights. Removing it, reorganizing the overhead panel, and installing the glass cockpit displays to replace the engineer’s monitoring functions constituted substantial structural and systems rework of the forward fuselage of each affected aircraft. Critically, because each of the roughly 30 affected aircraft was at a different stage of assembly when the two-crew decision landed, the rework work package differed for each airframe. Boeing’s configuration management team had to assess each aircraft individually, determine its exact build state, and plan a discrete rework sequence tailored to that specific jet.

This crisis, painful and expensive as it was, turned out to be the crucible in which Boeing’s modern change incorporation discipline was forged. The 767 program was forced, by necessity, to develop systems to track the individual configuration state of each pre-production aircraft and to plan unique, aircraft-specific work packages with the rigor required to satisfy the FAA.

747-400 and 777: Lessons Applied

The 747-400, which rolled out of Everett in January 1988 and earned its type certificate in January 1989, proved the discipline could scale. New wings, a glass cockpit, additional engine options, tail fuel tanks, and extended range made it, in certification terms, a new aircraft described as a derivative—one that reduced the number of cockpit dials, gauges, and knobs from 971 to 365. Engineers who had worked through the 767’s cockpit rework crisis were now senior members of the 747-400 program team. Change incorporation planning was a scheduled process that began early in the flight test campaign. The program was delivered four months late due to issues with the flight deck software, but Boeing had proven the foundational principles from the 767 crisis could be applied successfully to a major derivative.

If there is a single moment when the pre-production change incorporation discipline reached its high point, it is the 777 program. Launched in October 1990, first flown in June 1994, and certified in April 1995—with the unprecedented award of ETOPS-180 at service entry—the 777 represented the integration of two decades of hard-won experience incorporating change with a transformative new tool: full digital design.

The 777 was the first commercial airliner designed entirely in three-dimensional computer-aided design, using Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA software. Boeing was initially skeptical enough of the system’s accuracy to build physical mock-ups for validation checks; engineers found their alignment was more accurate than a physical engineering team could achieve, and all further planned mock-ups were canceled.

On the 767 and 747-400, tracking the configuration of a pre-production aircraft required correlating paper engineering drawings with build records, discrepancy sheets, and shop traveler documents. On the 777, every single part had a digital part number correlated to the CATIA design database. For the first time, Boeing could ask “what is the current configuration of pre-production aircraft number four?” and get an answer sourced directly from a digital record. When the FAA’s certification team wanted to verify that a specific airframe had been brought to the certified configuration, Boeing could produce a correlated digital trail from the original part definition through the engineering change authorization to the physical build record. This was the discipline at its peak.

787: Discipline Lost

The Boeing 787 program, launched in 2004 with a promised first flight in 2007 and customer delivery in 2008, was not simply a new airplane. It was a complete reimagining of how a commercial jet could be designed, funded, and manufactured. Boeing’s senior leadership, facing intense financial pressure, chose to distribute both the manufacturing and financial risks across a global supply chain of risk-sharing partners. Suppliers would design, build, and deliver complete major assemblies—entire fuselage sections, the wing structure, the empennage—absorbing the tooling and development costs themselves in exchange for long-term production revenue.

On paper, if major assemblies arrived at Everett already complete and certified-conforming, final assembly could proceed in days rather than weeks. With nearly 900 orders on the books before the first flight, the backlog of customer aircraft in various stages of pre-production assembly represented an enormous financial commitment by airlines worldwide.

What was not adequately considered was how distributed manufacturing would affect the one thing that change incorporation absolutely requires: a single, authoritative, continuously maintained knowledge of the configuration state of each pre-production aircraft. In hindsight, Boeing executives and program managers realized it had been a major error not to embed company employees within industrial partners and key suppliers to provide oversight.

On every program from the 767 through the 777, the answer to “what is the current configuration state of pre-production aircraft number three?” was always knowable—centralized under Boeing’s own configuration management system. On the 787, each major assembly arriving in Everett was built under the supplier’s internal processes, documented in the supplier’s own quality management system, and inspected by the supplier’s personnel. The components’ precise configuration upon their arrival in Everett was a fundamentally different and far more difficult question.

ZA001 made the first flight on Dec. 15, 2009, over two years behind the original schedule. Behind the six flight-test articles, a large number of additional pre-production aircraft had accumulated on the ramp and in the factory in various states of incompleteness. Their actual configuration states—as opposed to their intended design states—were not fully known.

Suppliers Not the Core Problem

The challenge was not that any single supplier was incompetent. It was systemic. When Boeing issued an engineering change, tracing its impact across assemblies built by multiple independent organizations in multiple countries, each with its own documentation standards, became an exercise in staggering complexity. Before change incorporation planning could begin for any given pre-production airframe, Boeing’s engineers first had to determine through direct physical inspection and forensic documentation review what that aircraft actually was at that moment.

FAA type certificates rest on a certification basis: a formal, documented demonstration that the aircraft, as built, meets every applicable airworthiness standard. On the 787, this process was undermined at its foundation. Because the configuration state of each major assembly was not fully known at the time of delivery to Everett, Boeing could not present the FAA with a complete, accurate picture of the changes required to bring each assembly into compliance. The certification basis for each pre-production aircraft remained open—a liability that had to be resolved, one documented discrepancy and one physical inspection at a time, before any aircraft could be delivered to a customer.

The program’s first flight slipped from 2007 to late 2009. Entry into service, promised in May 2008, did not occur until October 2011. Documentation gaps took years and billions of dollars to work through. The FAA eventually took the unusual step of retaining direct airworthiness certificate authority over all 787s—a signal of its deep concern about the state of Boeing’s configuration documentation system. Airline customers paid for Boeing’s configuration management failure in the hardest currency the airline business knows: years of missed schedules, network disruptions, and deferred revenue.

What failed was the foundational assumption that configuration management responsibility could be distributed along with manufacturing responsibility.  Configuration management at the precision required for FAA type certification must be engineered, owned, and enforced by a single entity with complete authority and complete visibility over every part on every aircraft at every moment in the production cycle.

The arc from the 767 to the 787 is not, at its core, a story about technology, or globalization, or even management competence in the conventional sense. It is a story about the indivisibility of configuration responsibility. With more than 30 777X airplanes on the ramp at Everett and a work scope that Ortberg described as still being defined airplane by airplane, Boeing is now testing whether that lesson was learned well enough to matter.

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