The damage that spin and uncritical reporting did to the 787 Dreamliner, Boeing, and the airlines

You don’t have to be interested in aircraft or flying to find a parable about corporate fantasies, outright lies, or the image spinning that can harm or destroy businesses by looking at the dismal saga of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

As mentioned in the preceding post, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries overnight publicly blindsided Boeing by dropping the use of composites in much of its MRJ project.

No doubt, Boeing will lean hard on 787 partner Mitsubishi to recant, modify, or explain away the obvious, but to what end? The Dreamliner is flirting with failure, or suspension, and has already set records for deceptive public announcements, broken promises and weasel words.

The damage done by the Dreamliner fantasy spinners that suppressed the contrary voices among this once great company’s engineers and designers reaches into Airbus, which fell for the rhetoric and committed to a largely plastic competitor, the A350, and into carriers like Qantas, which still has 50 of the 787s on order and has been left looking reckless in its unquestioning acceptance of the Boeing pitch .

Qantas officially maintains it will get its first 787s in the middle of 2013, and not just the one that Boeing can’t even get into the air, but its successor, the 787-9. Even Air New Zealand, which is the launch customer for that version, has known for some time it won’t get a –9 until 2014.

And now Mitsubishi, who made the wing section that broke unexpectedly in a stress test in May, has dropped the plastics from all the critical or ‘adventurous’ parts of its own MRJ regional jet project.

This 787 con, which featured the roll out of a shell of a jet in July 2007, and was the subject of so many seriously deficient claims by Boeing, was sucked up to by a compliant media that has only just started to ask the hard questions.

What exactly did Boeing expect to get from tame reporting? It didn’t help the project, and probably delayed to some extent the onset of reality.

Neither Qantas nor any other customer on public record, is shown to have commissioned expert independent analysis of the claims for high composite structural usage such as proposed for the 787.

Instead the college kids who look like they should have been Mormon missionaries, stomped the world talking up the 787 as a ‘game changer.’

These are the two most dishonest words in aviation language. The only game changed by the 787 has been that of getting away with fantasy claims for a 767 replacement that on all the real indications will be larger, heavier, more expensive to maintain, and with shorter range.

Boeing is a company where hype has suppressed reality right up to the last possible moment. And not been challenged in general by the mainstream media, until now.

Scott Carson, who was relieved of his ‘leadership’ role at the 787, was replaced as president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes by James Albaugh, whose previous achievements include the failure of the Connexion by Boeing sky internet product, and the failure to get a fully functioning Wedgetail airborne command and early warning aircraft ready for delivery to the RAAF at anything remotely resembling the original specifications or timetable.

Boeing is a case study of how rhetoric, spinning, and media cultivation can critically weaken if not destroy an enterprise.

Can it now provide a similar case study in how to repair itself? That depends on its customers, who had ordered over 900 Dreamliners, and are battling the GFC, as well as its own ability to make the 787 work.