In Boeing’s defense, Qantas recently pulled the same stunt with Airbus with some of their orders for the A380.
The change in their order cancels 15 planes and puts another 15 on a delayed delivery schedule, moved back to 2015, which will be 10 years after they placed the order.
I’m obviously not completely up to date on how aircraft orders work, but I’m quite surprised an airline can just pick up the phone and tell their vendor that they won’t be needing that $3 Billion delivery after all.
The change is of course blamed on “turbulent market conditions”, but I’m willing to bet Boeing now really regrets the delays in getting the Dreamliner ready for the market. By the time the plane is finally finished, we’ll have either reached a total financial apocalypse, or everything will be back to normal.
Of course, losing 15 planes still means Boeing has 851 firm orders for the 787, so while I’m sure they were not too thrilled with the phone call from Qantas, the plane itself is still a huge success. %Gallery-13995%
If you’ve been following the development of the Boeing 787, you may have heard about the electronic shades on their extra-large passenger windows.
So far, we’ve had to imagine how effective this technology would be, knowing it would be over a year before the first revenue flight of the Dreamliner.
Luckily, we managed to find the PPG Industries booth at the Paris Air Show, and scored a demonstration of this signature feature of the 787 known as Alteos Interactive Windows.
We’ve all been on airliners with plastic shades that frequently become stuck between the interior panel above the window. Sitting in that seat can be torturous on a sunny day. Not to mention the scratches they produce on the plexiglass inner pane.
Boeing and the airlines have found that these mechanical window shades represent an added maintenance cost, and for that reason, these reliable electronic shades will be a standard feature on all Boeing 787s and possibly other airliners in the future.
Passengers will be able to control the windows through five different settings, which take about a minute and a half to go from full dark to fully bright, at least on the version we saw. While this delay is a limitation of the design, the gradual transition could be a nice feature for passengers sleeping nearby.
Mark A. Cancilla, Director of Commercial Transparencies at PPG gave us a demonstration:
Flight attendants will have some control over the cabin as well. During a movie or as the sun begins to rise after a transatlantic flight, they’ll be able to lower the brightest setting without eliminating the view for someone who would rather look outside. And catching one of those sunrises can be more entertaining than an old sitcom episode you’ve seen three times that month anyway.
For some reason, I had imagined the darkest setting wouldn’t be dark enough, but I was thrilled to discover that PPG had designed a system that would allow as little as just .1% of the light to come through. Boeing has chosen a range of 70% transparency down to .1% for the Dreamliner over the five available steps.
The technology for these windows originally came from the automotive industry. In fact, you may have it in your car. The auto-dimming rear view mirror found in newer cars is the same technology behind these shades.
But will this technology make it into the pointy-end of the airplane or will pilots continue to resort to newspapers and safety briefing cards to shade themselves from the sun? We learned a bit about the 787’s cockpit windows and the new technology they’ll be using as well.
Poor Boeing. They are right in the middle of one of the worst economic downturns in their history, and their newest plane is creating a bit of a disaster of its own.
The 787 Dreamliner was scheduled to take its first flight early last year, but they realized back then that it could be moved to September 2008. We are now in the Summer of 2009 and Boeing is on their sixth delay.
The delay comes just one week after a horrible Paris Air Show, which is traditionally where Boeing announces a boatload of orders, but this year Airbus beat them, though neither manufacturer had that much good news to report. Airbus reported 112 aircraft sales, Boeing only sold 2.
The bad news is having a horrible effect on the share price of Boeing, which is down over 7% this morning (at the time of writing).
Still, fingers crossed that they sort out the problems with the plane. It really is a beauty, but it won’t do them (or their customers) any good if it just sits on the runway. By now I am sure Boeing will be regretting laughing at the problems Airbus encountered in building the massive A380 double-decker plane.
Now that the whole strike and fastener ruckus has been sorted out at Boeing, manufacturing is back in full swing on the 787 Dreamliner. The Chicago based company is so confident in their progress that they’ve actually announced another first flight and delivery date for their long heralded aircraft. As of last week, the two respective events are slated for second quarter of ’09 and for the first quarter of ’10.
Not that that means anything. Delivery schedules have been set and broken by the airframe manufacturer a half-dozen times, and by this point, nobody really expects them to hit the milestones. We’ll keep our fingers crossed though.
As for when Joe-consumer gets to ride in a Dreamliner, your first chance domestically should be on Delta Airlines, who now have the rights to Northwest‘s early commitment to purchase 18 787-9’s. Word in the underground though is that Delta might be interested in converting the order to 777’s though, so we may have to wait even longer than that.
It was hard to imagine that Boeing could keep on schedule for 787 deliveries with the strike at large among machinists, but yesterday they made the news official: first flight and deliveries are definitely pushed back.
Originally scheduled for 2008, the first flight of Boeing’s Dreamliner has been repeatedly delayed, most recently to Q4 of 2008 and now into 2009. During that time, several PR specialists have cycled through the media chair at Boeing, but the most recent word from Yvonne Leach, courtesy of Saj at Fleetbuzzeditorial, states that:
“Given the duration of the IAM work stoppage, first flight of the 787 Dreamliner will not be accomplished in the fourth quarter of 2008. The timeframe for first flight has not been established and will be based on the strike recovery assessment. The program is working to determine a new program schedule that will be announced when it is finalized.”
In addition to the obvious delays caused by the strike, the airframe manufacturer also announced that several non-conformities in the fasteners for the 787 contributed to the setback.
So when do we get to fly in a Dreamliner? Official word is now that deliveries won’t even begin until 2010. Don’t worry — it’ll be here before you know it.
