First Flight again: Boeing’s 777X finally gets off the ground

To say that this will be an uphill climb is underestimating the matter: since the last issue of the WOFA, in which we focussed entirely on the 737 MAX and Boeing, the company fired chief executive officer Dennis Muilenburg, suffered a leak of yet more damning internal communications that point to a toxic corporate culture driven by profit and not by safety, and has still to make visible progress towards getting the MAX back in the air.

It’s in this context that Boeing planned the high-visibility first flight of its great white-and-blue hope, the 777X.

You might have expected a slick communications operation to appeal to the sixty thousand viewers on Boeing’s livestream, watching in glorious technicolour as the company presented its newly turned over leaf alongside its newest airplane.

Instead you had a low-res video stream, helmed by two people sitting in a windswept, sideless tent in thirty-plus-knot gusts in Seattle in January, umm-ing and ahh-ing to wobbly, rain-spattered cameras over four hours of delays and eventual cancellation on Friday 24 January, with no improvement in the programming beyond the weather on the rescheduled first flight the next day.

It says something about a company when it fails so very badly at a massive open-goal opportunity, especially at a time when it very badly needs to kick the ball straight into that goal. For a company whose survival requires winning back public opinion, this isn’t just media inside baseball — nor is it meant ad hominem: Boeing has excellent media professionals in its ranks.

Live broadcasts require expertise, but are not immensely difficult, even in aviation, as companies like SpaceX and organisations like NASA among many others show regularly. This expertise can be purchased easily on the free market: Boeing is a company with market capitalisation of, at time of writing, US$181 billion. It’s no exaggeration that their local high school, community college or public access television station could have made a better job of the first flight broadcast, from start to finish.

The missed tricks were endless: the unsheltered external broadcast in high winds and rain. Vox pop interviews from the employee crowd that added nothing. Cameras that wobbled in the rain, while the hosts talked over air traffic control at key moments, yet left dead air in huge swathes. Two-minute interviews with experts that never got beyond “we’re very excited about the 777X”.

Praises of the 777X’s low requirements for pilot retraining from earlier models, in what has to be a candidate for the most maladroit thing to say in the context of the 737 MAX since the last batch of released emails. Excruciatingly awkward smartphone-filmed internal comms video of various Boeing teams yelling “you rock, 777X!”.

Missing the deployment of the folding wingtips. Almost missing the eventual landing of the aircraft. No scripts, no consistent messaging, and no simple explainer videos for a captive, free audience of sixty thousand worldwide.

And the 777X just sat there for hours at the end of the runway, with a subtitle box stating: “due to inclement weather, the 777X is holding at the end of the runway”.

Fundamentally, questions must surely be asked about why Boeing tried to conduct any first flight on a wet, windy January Friday given forecasts — which came true — for strong winds blowing right up the 777X’s tailpipe along the north-south runway.

(Paine Field in Everett, adjacent to Boeing’s widebody factory, is surrounded by residential areas to the south so test flights are always conducted to the north.)

In the case of the 777X first flight, this meant that the aircraft needed to take off with a tailwind of no more than 10kt. Forecasts and indeed METAR observations were double or even triple that on the ground.

Moreover, with any first flight there is always risk. A prudent operator of test aircraft would generally want a dry runway, visual flight rules conditions and reasonably high cloud ceilings in the event of any problems. Those were not present on the day of the first attempt, and even on the second day conditions were not optimal.

Especially in the face of questions over the company’s commitment to safety over profit, it is curious that Boeing did not scrub the first day’s launch before starting the aircraft towards the end of the runway.

A company with its eye on the ball would have used the launch of its latest product to reassure its airline customers and their passengers that it had turned the corner on its problems, in terms of its production output and in terms of its approach to communicating what it does to the world.

In the case of the 777X first flight, Boeing did precisely the opposite.

Fortunately for Boeing, subsequent flights of the 777X seem to be on track, expanding the flight envelope and testing its capabilities around Washington state and further afield. We’ll have an update on the test flights, and on the 777X programme, in the next issue of the World of Aviation.

…the aircraft needed to take off with a tailwind of no more than 10kt