- On Wednesday, the 10th of August 2022, Boeing finally delivered its first
Boeing 787 in over a year. Hopefully, that's the end of some troubles
that has been going on for Boeing for almost two years now. And what those problems are, and how that
might have an effect on the ongoing travel chaos that we're seeing around the world right now, we'll talk about in this video, so stay tuned. The 10th of August 2022 was a
really big deal for Boeing. Now, there have been rumors that Boeing
were to be able to resume their delivery of their flagship Boeing 787 for weeks prior, most recently on the Farnborough Airshow, but Boeing hadn't been able to go
on out and confirm that officially, because they were still awaiting the final
green light from the regulator, the FAA. The aircraft that was finally delivered last
week to American Airlines was a Boeing 787-8, which is the shorter version
of the Boeing 787 family, and it was delivered from its assembly
plant in Charleston, South Carolina, down to Victorville in South California. Now, this aircraft wasn't exactly new. It was actually completed about a year ago. And American Airlines is expecting eight more
787s to be delivered before the end of 2022. The production issues that actually stopped the
deliveries of the Boeing 787 started back in 2020. And initially, Boeing didn't think that this
was going to have any far reaching consequences. Remember, this happened in September 2020, in between waves of the pandemic, where the industry was subject to both
national and international lockdowns. Obviously, the Boeing 787 is a long haul aircraft, and in between these international lock downs, there wasn't really a big need from the airlines to get this new aircraft delivered. In fact, even before this delivery stop happened, some Boeing customers like Qantas, for example, was taking delivery of the 787, and just putting
it straight into storage in the desert. Now the way that the aviation industry works
is that the airlines only pay a fraction of the cost of the aircraft
when they make the order. They pay the bulk of the money
on delivery of the aircraft. And of course, as the COVID 19
pandemic was ravaging the industry, a lot of these airlines they didn't really mind
that there was a little bit of delay in the delivery. This just meant that they didn't have
to pay this morning up to Boeing. But of course, for Boeing,
this was a big deal. It meant a lot of costs was sitting in these
aircrafts that was now sitting in the factory, where they weren't able to
actually get the money from them. So this meant that Boeing had
all the incentives in the world to try to sort out these production
issues as quickly as possible. And initially, Boeing assumed that this
would be a rather quick fix to do. They thought that the issue which I'm
going to explain in a second, was isolated to a small part of the aircraft. But in December 2020, it was revealed
that this production issue actually affected a much bigger
part of the Boeing 787, almost the entire fuselage. And this provided problems for Boeing because
it meant that a much bigger part of the aircraft would need to be inspected,
and this is a key issue. And I'll get to why shortly. So what is the actual problem then? Well, the Boeing 787 is the very latest all
new aircraft design coming out of Boeing. And if you remember, back in 2011,
when it was first released, there were some early teething issues. Initially, there was some issues with the
lithium batteries that were being used, and they needed lithium batteries,
because in the 787, the batteries and electrical systems is being used to a much greater extent than in earlier aircraft. For example, it's replacing some
of the hydraulic systems, but also part of the pressurization system. There was also some early issues with the
reliability of the engines that were being used. But both of these issues were fixed years ago. So, if those issues were fixed years ago,
and in 2020, the Boeing 787 was actually a a quite mature aircraft design, then what was it that then stopped the deliveries? Well, it turns out that there
are actually two different issues that appeared when the Boeing
engineer started looking into it. And I'll tell you all about the details of
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their annual premium subscription fee. Thank you, Brilliant. Now back to the video. So, the first problem was that the Boeing
787 was one of the very first aircraft to utilize a full carbon fibre fuselage design,
and it was the very first wide body. The fuselage is made from barrel sections
of carbon fibre that are then bonded together. And it was the accuracy of those
bonds that was the first issue. Dominic Gates, who is a fantastic aviation
reporter for The Seattle Times, first reported about these misalignment
issues in September 2020. And it was Boeing themselves that
reported these issues to the FAA. When these carbon fibre barrel sections
are to be bonded together, they are aligned using lasers. And during this alignment, there might be
some small gaps that the engineering team needed to eliminate. The laser guidance computers would
show exactly how big these gaps are, and then the engineering team is
supposed to use purpose-built shims in order to fill these gaps perfectly. But what Boeing found was that these shims
that were being used, were not of the correct size. One feature of the software that the engineers
were doing was built to warn engineers if a shim was too big, but it turns out that that
part of the software was not being used properly. And the next issue that was found was the
smoothness of the interior skin of the fuselage. Now, in this case, this smoothness
is a little bit relative, because the limits that the Boeing engineers
were working with are really, really small. The highest permissible value near some of
these joints was a non-smoothness of 0.005 inches, or 0.127 millimeters. So, it's very, very tiny. But still, it has to be within limits. Now, on its own, any of these
two problems is not really an issue. But when they were combined together,
it could become a bigger deal. So Boeing did what they should,
they reported it to the FAA. And initially, they thought that this was
something that was isolated to only a few aircraft. Eight of the aircraft that had already been
delivered to customers were grounded when this was found out, and Boeing together
with the FAA started digging deeper into the problem. Now, to be absolutely clear, Boeing have said numerous
times and did say last week as well on the delivery, that these issues that I've
just been talking about, were not of an immediate flight safety concern. That is also true for some of the other
issues that I'm just about to discuss. Another factor in this story is that at the time
that these problems were revealed back in 2020, Boeing was assembling their 787
in two different sites. Now, that is not unusual at all. Airbus, for example, have many different assembly
sites around Europe and even in the United States. But Boeing thought that these production problems
was isolated to only one of these two sites. The smaller Boeing 787s, the 787-8 and 787-9, they were put together in
Everett in Washington States. And the bigger, the 787-10, was put together
in Charleston, South Carolina. Boeing thought that these problems were only isolated
to aircraft that was coming out of the Charleston site, but as the FAA started digging deeper into this, they basically found that they were unhappy
with the production from both sites. In October 2020, Boeing announced that they
were going to consolidate the operation and production of the Boeing 787
to its Charleston site in South Carolina. This was part of a cost cutting drive that Boeing
was doing in the wake of the grounding of the 737 Max, and it also included the selling and the
stopping of leasing of several buildings, especially in Washington State. In any case, Boeing and its engineers worked
furiously on trying to solve these problems, and in March 2021, it looked like
everything was back under control when the deliveries of the 787 started with
the first aircraft to United Airlines. However, that wouldn't last for very long
because in May 2021, just a few months later, FAA once again stepped in and
stopped the deliveries of the 787. This time, it had to do with the FAA not being
entirely happy with the way the Boeing was proposing to check for flaws in already produced 787s. Boeing believed that they had identified the
cause for these bonding issues and because they knew the cause, they could
use an analytical program to kind of identify which areas of the aircraft where these flaws
were most likely and eliminate other parts. Of course, they wanted to do this because
checking every single joint in the fuselage is extremely expensive, especially on already produced aircraft
where they needed to remove the cabin in order to get access to the joints. But the FAA stated that they needed more time in
order to evaluate the data that Boeing was providing and check that this process
was actually good enough, and they ended up rejecting the process altogether
until Boeing made some changes to it. A few months after the
delivery stopped in 2021, Boeing received some further headaches
associated with the Boeing 787. And those headaches involved a further check
needed for the forward pressure bulkhead, the door frames, and some suspect titanium
parts that had been delivered. Fortunately, these issues were isolated to
only a few Boeing 787s that were provided, and these were easily identified. Right now in August 2022. Boeing has about 120 787s
that's sitting in storage awaiting to be checked and
then getting prepared for delivery. And it's worth noting that even though production
stopped in Everett, back in 2021, there's still a lot of already finished Boeing 787s
that's sitting on the ground there waiting for delivery. And that's why Boeing has retasked a lot of
its personnel that it had employed up there from producing aircraft into checking these
aircrafts prior to delivery. Finally, on the 8th of August 2022, FAA said that
they now thought that all of the Boeing processes met the certification standard that they required, and Boeing could officially start
delivering the Boeing 787 again. But this doesn't mean that it's all smooth
sailing for Boeing from here, because for the time being, the FAA have
decided that they are going to pre-check the production quality of every single Boeing
787 that are to be delivered. This is different from the system
that they used to have with Boeing, where certain Boeing employees had
been given the authority from the FAA to do that final production check. That used to be a much smoother and quicker
procedure, but for the time being, the FAA have decided to dedicate their
own personnel to doing this job. But you might be asking yourself, what about all of the other Boeing 787s
that are out there flying right now? Well, like I mentioned before, eight of those
were grounded due to those secondary quality effect. And for the rest of the fleet, both the FAA and
all of the other licensing authorities out there, says that these issues are not
really a flight safety risk. And because of that, when these aircraft comes
in for their regular major maintenance checks, probably D checks, then Boeing has put together
a program to check for these issues and possibly rectify them then. So they will continue to fly according
to their normal schedule. The new aircrafts that are being produced
right now do not have these bonding issues. And that's because Boeing changed its production
processes to eliminate the problem. But that still leaves about 120 aircraft
that are still on the ground, awaiting checking, and then delivery to customer. And like I already mentioned, these inspection
takes a lot of time and resources to do. And since now both Boeing personnel
and FAA personnel is involved, it's going to be interesting to see at what
rate Boeing can continue to deliver this aircraft out to customers. And that pace of delivery is actually really,
really important because we're not in 2020 anymore. Now, the airline customers out there are no
longer happy to wait for their wide-body deliveries, they need those aircraft because
people are starting to travel. And in some cases, they're traveling even more
than they did back in 2019, prior to the pandemic. Now, I've already done a video about the travel
chaos, which you can check out up here. But that travel chaos is mostly down to lack
of personnel both on the behalf of the airport and the airlines. But lack of aircraft is going to
become a bigger and bigger issue. And that's because you might
remember that during the pandemic, a lot of the airlines were retiring their
older, less efficient aircraft types. And the idea was that if and when
the demand would start bouncing back, well, then they would be able to use their
new generation, more efficient aircraft types, which the Boeing 787 is. So all of those Boeing 787s that
are awaiting delivery, are going to be soon sorely needed by the industry. Prior to the pandemic, Boeing was delivering
as many as 14 Boeing 787s per month, which is a huge number for wide body jets. But now sources like Jon Ostrower from The Air Current
are predicting that after these first few deliveries, the delivery pace is going
to slow way down again, because of the issues that we've just mentioned. And I think that a lot of industry insiders are
looking very closely the next couple of months at how well Boeing is keeping
up their delivery schedule. So far, these 787 problems has cost Boeing
as much as $5.5 billion, with a B, and that's, of course, a lot of money that
Boeing needs to scrape back somehow, which is going to be hard to do if
the delivery process drags out further because they are then going to potentially have to
pay more money to its customers for delivery delays. But Boeing is likely hoping that the 787 is
going to receive a lot of new orders now when they can resume delivery again, similar to what happened to the
Boeing 737 Max after its ungrounding. But we're going to have to wait
and see what happens. So what do I think about this then? Well, a big part of me really hopes that Boeing
will get a lot of new orders for the Boeing 787. I have a lot of friends who fly the aircraft,
and they say that it is a fantastic, efficient, quiet, nice aircraft. It's very comfortable to fly in,
I've flown in it myself. And it is the future for the aviation industry. Not only the 787, but the Airbus A350,
and these new type of aircraft. Also, I feel that Boeing did exactly
what they were supposed to. They found out an issue in the production,
they notified the FAA about it, and then they took the time needed in order
to find, rectify, and check all of the aircraft. This is the way that the aviation
industry is supposed to work, and I personally is really looking forward
to get myself on to a 787 and go out traveling and maybe see you guys in the near future. So, what do you guys think? Put your comment in the comment section below and remember to subscribe to the channel
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