How Boeing transformed the aviation industry

After five years under wraps, the future of commercial aviation is about to make its worldwide debut.

The global spotlight will be shining on The Boeing Co. July 8 (07-08-07) as it unveils its newest passenger jet in 13 years: the 787 Dreamliner. It hasn’t even flown yet and already the 787 is making aviation history as the world’s hottest-selling and most technically advanced new commercial jet ever.

Not since Boeing ushered in the jet age with its 707 in 1954 has there been such hoopla over a new passenger airplane. For the 787 — the company’s first all-new jet since the 777 was unveiled in 1994 — Boeing has rented an entire football field to simulcast the rollout, which will be emceed by broadcaster Tom Brokaw.

While the Dreamliner — the world’s first commercial jet made primarily of plastic — is ready for its public debut on the ground, the airplane still must prove itself in the air. First flight is scheduled for September, followed by a series of certification test flights this fall and commercial service in May 2008 with All Nippon Airways of Japan. Boeing will have six 787s in test flights by the end of this year.

As a 91-year-old patriarch of aviation, Boeing is no stranger to risk. But not only is Boeing betting the company on its $10 billion Dreamliner program, it is breaking new ground on how and where commercial airplanes will be designed, built and flown for generations to come. Even the material used to build the 787 is setting new industry wide standards. Instead of using aluminum, Boeing is relying on manmade carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic, known as composite, for the entire airframe.

“This is the next evolutionary step in aviation,’’ says aviation consultant Scott Hamilton of Issaquah, Wash.-based Leeham Co. “It’s a game-changer for its manufacturing and assembly processes and will probably be mimicked by succeeding airplanes.’’

In what Boeing describes as the world’s biggest and most sophisticated industrialized project ever, the 787 program has taken more than a million hours of supercomputer design work involving hundreds of aerospace workers from every corner of the globe.

Instead of designing and building the commercial jet itself, as Boeing traditionally has done, the company has evolved into an Erector-set assembler of sorts, farming out 70 percent of the 787 work to nearly 50 partners and top-tier suppliers at 135 sites spanning four continents.

Boeing is giving its overseas suppliers much more than a slice of the manufacturing pie, in exchange for lucrative aircraft orders. For the 787, Boeing includes the recipe too: wide responsibilities — including financial risk — for designing and building major sections of the jet, which are then flown to Boeing’s final assembly plant in Everett, Wash., where they are essentially snapped together. That’s a humbling first for the once-arrogant company that vowed never to give up wing design and production.

Boeing is using sophisticated Dassault database management software that allows all of the 787 work sites to be “virtually linked” 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, ensuring that everyone works out of the same database with one set of drawings.

“The 787 not only will revolutionize air travel, it represents a new way of building airplanes,’’ says Scott Strode, 787 vice president of Airplane Definition and Production.

Gone are the noisy factory floors with handkerchief-clad mechanics clanging away on shiny metal. Today’s 787 “manufacturing technicians” carry hand-held computers with airplane specs that aid in joining together major airplane sections — fuselage, wings, horizontal stabilizer and vertical fin – in cleaner, quieter assembly bays.

Final assembly began May 21 when prefabricated aircraft sections were flown in on cargo versions of Boeing’s 747 jumbo jets, called Dreamlifters. Boeing itself only produces the composite vertical fin with risk-sharing partners producing the rest of the airplane: wings coming from Japan, fuselage sections via Italy and South Carolina, landing gear from France, rudder sections from China and engines from Britain and the U.S.

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