Airplane Roulette

I've been reading quite a bit about Boeing's new airplane, the 787 / Dreamliner. If you care about airplanes, this is one is really exciting, and quite different from anything that has come before.



A while back I wrote a post about, in part, Boeing's production facility in Washington, and about the monumental nature of designing and building a modern jetliner. Recently we're seeing some of the things touched on in that post coming into play.



Airbus undertook a few years ago to build the largest production passenger airplane yet made, their super-jumbo A380 (shown above in an early test flight). The economics of such an undertaking are really staggering, the kind of thing that even some governments could not afford to tackle. It goes without saying that a pretty rock-solid business model would have to be consulted and confirmed before undertaking such a project, since failure of the project would be a large-scale business catastrophe. Boeing has said that from the 747 program in the late '60s onward, every new aircraft design has been a make-or-break proposition for them. Think of the pressure to not screw up! Think of the pressure to sell the product, the pressure to not promise what you cannot deliver. Suddenly business seems like a field of high romance and derring-do. It may not be quite the same situation for Airbus, as they are bankrolled by several major European governments. But the financial stakes would be the same, even if (and I don't know this) the company's existence is less vulnerable.

Boeing announced their 787 program at about the same time as Airbus announced the A380. These two designs do not compete with each other, so there's a real sense of competition about whose vision of the future of aviation is the right one, or the sounder one. Both companies are putting their necks and reputations and thousands and thousands of jobs on the table in support of their hand. Interestingly, Boeing quickly floated the possibility of an enlarged version of the 747, clearly to compete directly with the A380, but dropped the plan for lack of interest.



In turn, when Boeing's seriousness about the 787--and the rumblings about the great consumer interest in the program--became clear, Airbus decided to hedge its bets and announced yet another new airplane, the A350, clearly trying to answer the threat from the 787. The A350 seems the bolder--and more strenuous--move, since a stretch 747 would build on an existing and successful model; at least some portion of the daunting engineering involved has already been done. The A350 was initially to be derived from the successful A330, but has evolved into a much more extensive, ground-up program. The point is, Airbus is already in the soup up to its earlobes with the A380. The whole A350 strategy smells of 11th hour desperation.


The development of either the A380 or the A350 would be a huge undertaking; doing both at once is almost unfathomable, and the company is showing the strain. The A380 program is seriously behind schedule--a couple years now--plagued by fairly significant wiring issues and some structural problems which have resulted in decreased payload projections. (Everything nowadays is designed and tested on computer; but for major assemblies not to perform during physical testing as expected is a failure in modeling software somewhere, I imagine. Heads will surely roll.) Several big contracts have either been dropped or are in serious joepardy. My own company and the other big cargo carrier both placed an order for 10 A380 freighters, and one of the orders has cancelled over the delay; speculation is rife that the other order is shortly to follow. Plus, the launch customer of the passenger version has announced that they're shopping around for an alternative due to the delays. Even without the cancellations, the total order book is considerably short thus far of what Airbus had hoped, and short of the program's break-even point.

Now, in an effort to get control of things, the company is trying to restructure. But they're talking about 15,000 job cuts--something like a quarter of the entire workforce--and there is infighting about the location of the A350 final assembly facility. The French and German contingents are at each other's throats. In the high stakes world of jet manufacture, this is all pretty big news.

Airbus's woes are like a shot of steroids to Boeing. Long the world's biggest airplane manufacturer, Boeing lost that title for the first time to Airbus a few years ago. The current situation looks sure to return Boeing to the top of the heap for the foreseeable future.

Not that they wouldn't have taken back the spot legitimately with the Dreamliner; it's that amazing. There's one thing in particular that I'm especially enthusiastic about: the fuselage is made of carbon fiber, just like a Formula One car, or an America's Cup yacht. While there has been an increasing use of composite construction in more recent airplanes, The 787 goes well into new territory in terms of composite material usage. This is the first large jet with a carbon fiber fuselage.



The thing that wears airplanes out as they age is not takeoffs and landings (as one might suspect) but rather pressurization cycles. It's the pressurizing that eventually fatigues the fuselage and can cause failure. We don't hear about this, as airlines and manufacturers are well aware of it and they have the situation firmly in hand. But there were a few spectacular pressurization- and fatigue-related failures with early jetliners, and these led to our modern practices.



One of the reasons my beloved DC-8 has proven so durable is that it was designed--you might say overdesigned--in response to these early failures. Donald Douglas responded to these new issues with an especially thick fuselage skin, with the result that the DC-8 is not life-limited like other jetliners. It's just about impervious to the effects of pressurization. This kind of durability is not a hallmark of newer jetliners. Northwest has been flying its DC-9s now for 40 years, while its first Airbus A320s--airplanes less than half as old--have already been retired after reaching the end of their design lives.



Well, this new Boeing has the potential to raise the durability bar higher than ever. Carbon fiber simply does not fatigue. Certainly it can fail, but if properly designed to deal with the loads presented to it (with sensible margins) it can survive almost unlimited pressurization cycles. Everything else on the airplane is replaceable. I saw a fuselage cross section at the Everett plant in Seattle, and it's a spectacular piece of work.


There are lots of things for an airline pilot and machinery geek to be enthusiastic about with a new jetliner design, but this one is making so many leaps in a single step it's almost like a new golden age of aviation. Unfortunately, I'll probably never get the chance to fly one. My company, and cargo carriers generally, are maybe less inclined to spring for the latest and greatest (though we still have quite a few airplanes we purchased new). The way we use airplanes, especially in the domestic system, makes buying used airplanes economically sound. Our DC-8s, for example, were 20-some years old when the company purchased them, and nearly 20 years later they're still plugging away with no end in sight. And they cost a fraction of what a new Boeing 767 cost. Still, if the 787 makes the kind of progress in efficiency that Boeing as advertising--upwards of 20%!--one can't rule anything out.