Boeing's other late dream, the 747-8, image courtesy Boeing
The ultimate Boeing 747, the 747-8, isn’t flying this year.
Barely a week after Boeing starting feeding nonsense into the ears of unquestioning reporters about how the 747-8 would exceed its specifications, it has announced it won’t fly until early next year, and has informed investors it will take a $US 1 billion hit because of problems with the project.
It is barely a month since the head of the 748 project, Mohammad “Mo” Yahyavi told reporters up to three of the initial freighter version of the jet could be flying by the end of this year, and that first flight was imminent.
He is either a fool or a liar. How can someone head a commercial jet program and not know the true situation when he opens his mouth?
The 748 looks every bit as shonky in its execution as the 787 Dreamliner project.
In its official statement to the markets, Boeing says ‘late maturity of engineering designs has caused greater than expected re-work and disruption in manufacturing.’
Please. Maturity? The 747 first flew in 1969. It has benefited from many enhancements down the years. It is a known quantity. The –8 freighter and passenger versions involve an adapted version of the new generation GE engines that will also, one day, fly on the 787 Dreamliner. The actual body of the 748 is stretched, making it the longest commercial jet even made.
The 748 has sold less than 100 jets, most of them in the freighter version, with Lufthansa the only carrier to order the airline version, originally for delivery next year, but not now expected until 2012.
Under the current management of the company Boeing has turned into a monstrous joke. Highlights of this dark comedy of spin and deception include deskilling the work force to the extent that it couldn’t even fit the right bolts into the right holes on the plastic fantastic 787, which wasn’t supposed to have so many bolts in the first place in its once seamless, super light weight carbon fibre laminated oven cooked shell.
Other acts in the comedy have included the Wedgetail Early Warning and Command jet for Australia, based on the 737 platform. This project is also late, and rumoured to have been compromised in terms of radar performance, with Australia even suspending payments pending clear evidence of something worth buying actually eventuating.
This morning we are told only 50% of the work needed to be completed before first flight of 748 has been accomplished. Yet only recently we were told first flight was likely by November. This is more evidence of entrenched serial misrepresentation of the true state of affairs at Boeing.
Boeing has claimed many times that the 748 is more efficient than the Airbus A380. It was so efficient on paper it was ridiculed off the podium at a presentation to Qantas some years ago.
In retrospect, a similar fate should have befallen the Dreamliner, but Qantas bought the dream, and must be wondering if it will in fact ever get any of its remaining order for 50 of the 787s this side of 2015.
13 Comments
Late maturity! Ha!!!!!! Sounds like it’s about to go through pubescence. Yes, I guess it is a bit late for a 40-year-old. We were supposed to get a 747 ‘Intercontinental’, but all we get is verbal incontinence from Boeing.
We all know that the ’787 plastic Dreamliner’ (hey, that also sounds like an incontinence product) will not fly in 2009, as Boeing assured us it would. We just have to sit around and twiddle our thumbs, and wait for the inevitable announcement of another delay by Boeing.
That’s a fair question to ask. I reckon the rot may have started in the 1990s with the loss of experienced technical and project management expertise through retrenchments, retirements etc, the relocation of Boeing’s headquarters from Seattle to Chicago, the loss of (or failure to obtain) several major civilian and military contracts (that went to foreign and other US competitors), and various scandals around corruption, industrial espionage and other unethical behaviours. Though still a sizable entity, the Boeing corporation of today appears to be only a shadow of its former self on most levels. When it can’t even do something as basic as properly managing its public relations, you have to wonder about its ability to design and build jets.
I’ve heard it suggested that Boeing’s woes stem from the McDonald Douglas merger. There was an organisation that couldn’t make a commercial airliner that anyone wanted to buy – and now their apparently running the show at Boeing.
The 787 and 747-8 programs are interesting to compare to the 777. It’s a great plane – my favourite for intercontinental flights – was delivered on time and with a great availability rate. What’s happened to them since they pulled that off so well?
The rot started with Airbus coming onto the scene. Prior to that Boeing had the civil aviation market pretty well covered and deliveries could and have been posponed with cutomers just having to cop it. All that changed with the arrival of Airbus and its innovative and modern approach to building planes. Is that surprising? Not really when one looks at Boeings and other American companies inflexibility? Many of them still try to build state of the art technological marvels in cumbersome medieval inches. The result, Boeing sold about 800 odd Dreams to a gullible aviation world? By the time that plane is finish it will have lost most of the promised advantages its sales department dreamt up. That annoying reality will of course dictate the real numbers of Dreamliners it will sell. I remember reading a few years back that it took about 0.5 tonnes of shims to put a 747 together, not a very reassuring production process is it?
The anti-union attacks on the workforce and it’s working conditions can’t have helped either. US employers especially big really big stockmarket listed ones have an almost pathological desire to de-unionise their workforces.
Unions especially really powerful ones can cause a business a lot of labour problems but a members of a unionised workforce (at least in the past) knew that with companies like Boeing they had a good paying job generally for life with a good pension and benefits. They therefore had a huge personal incentive for the company to be successful over the years.
As US companies have lowered wages, cut staff and off-shored their manufacturing or moved it to so called “right to work” states their employees (the experienced talented people who build their products and amonst other things pick up problems in designs and manufacture before they become catastrophic problems) have become less interested in their comapany’s long term success then their own short term survival in a dog eat dog corporate environment. Boeing and the US are now reaping what they have sown.
Found one about Boeing shims on the net:
Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane – 2004 – Business & Economics – 174 pages
with the process estimated that a 727 weighing forty-four tons typically contained a half-ton of shims.
That means a 747 had a hell of a lot more!
“Late maturity” – how’s that for yuckspeak (qv Uncle Roger in Flight International many years ago). What it actually means is:
“We got the bits from the sub-contractors for final assembly and they didn’t fit”.
which in turn means:
“We b*llsed up configuration control, project management, quality control and communications with subcontractors. Oh yes, and we lied to investors and airlines about the first flight when we knew there were serious problems just like we did with the 787″
Not in a new aircraft, but in an upgrade to an aircraft that it’s been building for 40 years… Which to me puts a much larger question mark over Boeing’s competence than even the problems with the much more ambitious “clean sheet” 787.
Did anyone else notice the linked press release states “Because the 747 program is in a loss position”. WTF??? They’re not saying the 747-8 program is making a loss, they’re saying the 747 itself is losing money. After 40 years production and I believe at times gross margins as high as 50%? Either Boeing is even more incompetent than we think, or it’s over-the-top accounting spin.
maxelcat – I’ve also wondered what happened to the company that pulled off the 777 (itself a major ground-breaker in the use of CAD/CAM in design and production) so effortlessly. I tend to blame (as in many other industrial sectors) the concept of management/business administration as a generic skill – if you can manage a snack food company you can manage an aerospace one. Er, no, in the latter you’re working at the frontiers of technology and if you let marketing spin run the company you’d better understand what technological capabilities you can apply to support the marketing.
Qantas made the worst blunder of the century, by purchasing the A380 instead of the B747-8i
Re Bree “Qantas made the worst blunder of the century, by purchasing the A380 instead of the B747-8i
Sounds like wishful thinking to me with oil prices bound to keep rising and a plane that uses less petrol per passenger km than a car.
As to blaming unions for the Dreamliner delay, did they sell a wishful dream that was bound to turn into nightmare because that exercise was not driven by executable innovation, but loss of market share to Airbus.
What, that same A380 that you can buy a Qantas ticket on today, versus that B747-8 that is as real as the picture accompanying this article?