Behind the eight ball

And three months later, Boeing is forced to admit a further three month later in the aircraft’s first flight.

Certainly the 747-8 is a radical departure from the 747-400, but Boeing is the world’s most experienced aircraft builder and it knows the 747 intimately.

But only a week after asking media outlets if they would like to come to the first flight the company delays it three months.

Boeing’s credibility, once the most solid in the industry has taken a severe battering. It is impossible to know where the problem lies. With engineering, lawyers, accountants or media advisors?

Whoever is driving the apparent delay in bad news it is high time to step aside and get back to frank and open accountability. Over the past few years media has given up on learning anything from Boeing related to the 787 and 747 and turned to a number of very well connected sources that include journalists from Flight, Aviation Week ATW as well as Australian Aviation.

The stark fact is the virtually every major delay in either program has been broken by or flagged by these outlets.

It is certainly understood that in this extremely competitive market place a company does not want to air its dirty laundry for all to see but frank disclosure is far, far better than being found out by the media.

In this electronic age of Twitter, Facebook, ACARS, SBS, Google an extraordinary amount of information is available about aircraft and airlines in seconds. For the cost of $1000 the lay person can have an ATC display screen with all flights in a radius of several hundred kilometers on a computer with a SBS receiver.

According to a Flightblogger engineering source the delay in the 747-8 program wasn’t due to one big issue, but rather “death by a thousand cuts.”

The source explained that diversion of engineering to the 787 program meant “more engineering errors escaped than what could be considered normal.”

Other issues include the decision against a full systems integration lab for the 747-8, given that it was a derivative aircraft with many legacy systems but that meant many issues cropped up on the aircraft, rather than being caught in the lab.

Another explanation was that those workers on the assembly floor were adjusting to building a new airplane, rather than just another 747.

And maybe that is the root of the problem. It appears at a variety of levels that many Boeing employees have never been seized with the amount of new technology in and thus the potential of the 747-8.

New engines, new interior, virtually new wing and modified cockpit will make it a starkly different aircraft to the 747-400 and thus a major drain on engineering resources.

According to the Seattle Times, citing company sources, at the time of the delay announcement in early October of the total number of tasks required to build a 747-8 from structural build up all the way to pre-flight activities, just over 50 per cent had been fully completed.

Of the balance of tasks that have yet to be completed many remain partially completed, paced by engineering changes and as a result the total level of completion was far above 50 per cent mark.

It is however a positive sign that the 747-8 delay announcement was made only four weeks after Jim Albaugh, previously president and CEO of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) took over the role at Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

Just maybe this is the start of a new era of accountability and communication. The entire aviation industry is counting on it.