Painful lessons

Speaking at a dinner in Seattle to mark the delivery of Qantas’s 250th Boeing airliner and the start of final assembly of Jetstar’s first 787, Mike Sinnett, vice president of engineering and chief project engineer for the 787, noted how with the 787 Boeing had, in baseball terms, tried to “hit the ball out of the park” with its ambitious plans for the aircraft.

After a few swings and misses and a few mis-hit foul balls, Boeing may, finally, have hit the ball out of the park.

Certainly the 787 was nothing if not ambitious. While it looks like pretty much any other widebody twin jet airliner of the last 30 years, given the aircraft’s carbon composite construction that resemblance is not even skin deep. With its extensive use of composites, new engines, new technologies such as the bleedless electrical system and lithium ion batteries, new production processes, and an outsourced production model that crosses multiple time zones and multiple cultures and languages, not surprisingly, executing the 787 has proved complex and fraught.

And with the 787’s painful progress from rollout to battery grounding, there is no question that Boeing has lost some skin along the way. Boeing was a company whose reputation was built on having engineering at the core of its corporate culture. But somewhere along the way, in conceiving and executing the 787, that engineering-first approach was overtaken by an over-ambitiousness driven by financial considerations.

Consequently, Jetstar’s first 787 is being delivered five years later than first planned. That’s five more years that it has been flying A330s burning something like 10 per cent more fuel per passenger per flight, and five years longer that Qantas has had to keep running tiring 767s on domestic routes at a time when Virgin Australia is making an audacious assault on Qantas’s business market. Admittedly Boeing has compensated Qantas for the 787’s delays, but no doubt it would have preferred the aeroplanes rather than banking the cash.

So it was encouraging to hear Sinnett affirm that engineering, and project execution, are again at the heart of Boeing’s decision-making. And all through the battery grounding issue Sinnett has certainly impressed as a hugely competent engineer’s engineer (and one with an excellent background and breeding – in an earlier life Sinnett worked on the F/A-18 Hornet, and his father worked at McDonnell on the Gemini capsule for NASA’s second manned spaceflight program).

Sinnett says to look to the execution of the 787-9 program as evidence that Boeing is back to its best, an aircraft that is now in final assembly and on time and on schedule to fly in coming months.

And clearly too Airbus has heeded the lessons of the 787, and its own headaches with the A380. Just as Australian Aviation was going to press the A350 was due to make its first flight. Less technically ambitious than the 787 to start with, unlike for the A380 and the 787 there was no high profile rollout ceremony for the A350, no sound and light shows and no gala dinners for airline CEOs and government dignitaries. Instead, after emerging from the paintshop the first A350 posed for a brief photoshoot with staff before entering preflight testing, part of Airbus’s efforts to project an image of getting on with the job, and executing on the A350’s development.

Plenty of potential challenges lie ahead for the A350, but clearly both Airbus and Boeing have learned from earlier mistakes, and their airline customers can now realise the promise offered by their new cutting-edge carbon composite twin-jets.

Australian Aviation travelled to Seattle as a guest of Qantas and Boeing.

Sinnett says to look to the execution of the 787-9 program as evidence that Boeing is back to its best.