Boeing 787 (partie 1)

Le vol inaugural du "Dreamliner" de Boeing écourté

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Le vol inaugural du 787 "Dreamliner", le nouveau long-courrier de Boeing, a été écourté mardi en raison du mauvais temps, a annoncé la firme aéronautique.
L'appareil avait décollé peu avant 18h30 GMT de la piste d'une usine Boeing située à quelque 50 kilomètres au nord de Seattle pour un vol censé durer quatre heures.
Ce premier vol avait été repoussé à six reprises et accuse un retard de plus de deux ans par rapport au calendrier initial.

Boeing's 2nd flight test 787 may fly as early as 21 December
By Jon Ostrower

ZA002, Boeing's second 787 flight test aircraft, may fly as early as "next week", according to Pat Shanahan, Boeing vice president of airplane programmes.

Speaking to ATI and Flightglobal on the sidelines following the 15 December maiden sortie of ZA001, the first 787, Shanahan added that ZA002 might flight before ZA001 flies on its second flight which is expected before 25 December.



ZA002 will be ferried from the company's Everett, Washington facility to Boeing Field south of Seattle, where the flight test operations centre is housed.

In preparation for first flight, the aircraft is expected to begin a "mini-gauntlet" of closed loop testing on 18 December to ensure the functionality of all the aircraft's systems before final taxi tests and first flight early next week.

ZA001 underwent an expanded round of gauntlet testing before its maiden sortie.

ZA002 is the second of second of four Rolls-Royce powered Trent 1000 flight test 787 aircraft, out of a total of six. The balance are powered by General Electric GEnx-1B engines

It was six years ago this month that Boeing’s board of directors gave the “authority to offer” for its Commercial Airplanes unit to formally begin selling a new airplane with a light-weight composite fuselage that it was calling the 7E7. The “E” stood for efficient.


Later renamed the 787, the airplane was formally launched in April 2004 and has had unprecedented market success, especially for a wide-body jet.


But as everyone who has followed this ambitious industrial undertaking knows, the design and manufacturing of the airplane has been anything but efficient.


Public hints of trouble in the supply chain began arising in 2006. Boeing used software tools to support a design-for-manufacturing approach that allowed it to map the entire build process, not only in its final assembly factory but also down through the supply chain. The software was one reason the program’s executives felt they were on top of the situation and they expressed their confidence publicly.


“In some areas, [we] are a little bit behind,” said Vice President Mike Bair, then in charge of the 787, acknowledged late in 2006. To catch up, he said Boeing would do what it had done many times before on troubled programs, it would “dump in” company resources both in terms of money and management to drag the 787 back on schedule.


In fact, Boeing acknowledged it was injecting an additional $50-$100 million in research and development (R&D) capital that year and said it would need twice that much in 2007. Still, Boeing CEO Jim McNerney told Wall Street that the problems were being managed. “This plane will be done on time, and within contractual commitments,” he said in a 2006 year-end wrap-up.



The small stuff


Many of the problems Boeing experienced were to be expected as suppliers gained experience making the huge, single-piece composite fuselage and wing assemblies that are the big airplane’s hallmark.


But some of the headaches came from small stuff, most notably, fasteners. This is ironic. One benefit of using single-piece fuselage assemblies is that composite layups eliminate the need for thousands of fasteners. But the large assemblies do not eliminate the fasteners altogether.


As Boeing in fina preparations for first flight, a case study has been released of just what happened with the fasteners and what Boeing has tried to do about it. The study comes from the William Davidson Institute (WDI) at the University of Michigan and is supported by the university’s Tauber Institute for Global Operations, which the company tapped to help it analyze how best to work its way out of its fastener mess. Their report shows that Boeing’s attempts to improve its fastener flow remain a work in progress.


Called “Boeing: The Fight for Fasteners,” the report was developed by research associate Moses Lee under the supervision of Professor Ravi Anupindi. Adam Martin, a Tauber Institute alumnus who helped lead Boeing’s fastener-recovery effort, contributed to the case study.


In his introduction, Lee could not resist quoting the Old English proverb, “For want of a nail the shoe was lost…” and it certainly seems appropriate.


“One driver for the delay was an industry-wide shortage of aerospace fasteners,” WDI notes. “Engineers at Boeing never could have imagined that fasteners, which comprise approximately 3% of the total cost of an aircraft, would become such an issue.”


Bair was among them. “It’s amazing what it comes down to at the end of the program,” he told The Wall Street Journal in June 2007, just a month before the airplane’s splashy rollout ceremony. “We’re getting down to the point that every part, even a bolt, is important.”


John Byrne, Boeing’s director of supplier management common commodities, and Valerie Feliberti, a senior manager for structural standards, were tasked to solve the problems. “We knew that we had to fundamentally change the structure of the industry’s supply chain,” Byrne told WDI. “This, of course, would be no easy task.”


It was made more difficult by the fact that in 2004 the aviation industry was beginning to emerge from the post-9/11 slump that sapped airplane orders. Over the next three years, Boeing’s orders soared, reaching 1,413 in 2007.


Even as it managed deliveries to avoid the boom-bust cycle that devastated its supply chain in the late 1990s, the company was in a race with the rest of the industry for supplies, including the bolts, nuts, rivets, washers and spacers commonly lumped together as “fasteners.”


By itself, Boeing reports that it consumes more than 700 million fasteners annually. Fasteners are mostly needed by prime and Tier-1 manufacturers. But WDI says more than 500 suppliers use them annually in worldwide aircraft production.


For Boeing’s airplane models, the company and six Tier-1 suppliers – Alenia Aeronautica, Fuji, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi, Spirit AeroSystems and Vought – accounted for 94% of fastener demand.



Demand escalates
As the industry began ramping up production, analysts estimated that fastener usage would grow at a 13% compound annual growth rate between 2003 to 2010 As raw material prices started to climb – partly because Asian manufacturing was expanding – the lead time for raw materials increased from one to two years.


After 9/11, the aerospace fastener industry quickly consolidated from six primary manufacturers to just three – Alcoa Fastening System, Precision Castparts and LISI Aerospace. They accounted for approximately 80% of the fasteners used to make Boeing’s airplanes.


The consolidation prompted manufacturers to significantly reduce their capacity and workforce, idling or permanently closing many plants. The fastener industry was running at 80-90% of capacity at the end of 2006 and facing labor shortages. Meanwhile, aerospace distributors started placing large orders to build up stockpiles, some speculating that they could charge premiums for spot purchases.


“However, with the uncertainties about what capital and training investments were required for new part types, and a lack of assurances on orders, [fastener] manufacturers held off adding capacity,” WDI says. “They wanted to wait until new contracts could be signed with aircraft manufacturers.”


This situation was compounded by an 18-month delay in Airbus A380 deliveries. “Its enormous fastener requirements created slack capacity in the industry, which made it less urgent for fastener manufacturers to increase capacity,” the report says.


Boeing did not sign its first long-term contracts with a select group of fastener vendors until 1995, when costs started rising. The result was an evolution in its relationship with the industry. At first, Boeing provided its suppliers with production forecasts to make it easier for them to plan. Three years later, it created specifications covering 80-90% of the fasteners it used rather than accept more common industry standards. It acted because the quality varied so widely on the fasteners it was receiving.


While this was good news from the quality control standpoint, many of its qualifications were so complex that they could take 12-18 months to approve, prompting suppliers to abandon the Boeing work and reducing its access to qualified sources.


Boeing also acted on the raw material front. To mitigate shortages, the company contracted with TMX Aerospace (part of ThyssenKrupp AG) in 1998 as a third-party logistics supplier. It wanted TMX to manage its ordering and distribution of aluminum and titanium. Boeing also developed a consumption based ordering system called Min/Max to manage its inventory levels.


Before the 787, Boeing was buying about half the fasteners it needed to build its airplanes; the rest were bought and installed directly on assemblies made for it by suppliers. On the 787, the plan was for suppliers to buy roughly 80% of the required fasteners.


“The shift in the control over the procurement process…started to exacerbate an already complicated fastener supply chain,” says WDI.


Adding to this complexity was the requirement for new types of fasteners with different coatings and a higher proportion of titanium to accommodate the wide use of composites in the 787.



A ‘big blaze’
The result: a big increase in spending on fasteners and operational risk to the program. Partners began complaining that they could not get fasteners. Boeing tried but was unable to satisfy all of them by sending shipments from its own inventory. “At this point, we knew there was something wrong,” says Feliberti.


The crisis was full blown by the summer of 2006. Byrne warned in 787 supplier council meetings that lead times were growing and the situation was more complex than the company had imagined. “After sharing this information with the senior leaders, the room fell silent,” he recalled. “There were a lot of worried and blank faces.”


Consultants McKinsey & Company was brought in to help map out a recovery plan for the supply chain. What it found was an industry that was “highly convoluted and lacked transparency.”


“What we initial thought was a small fire turned out to be a huge blaze,” said Byrne.


For most fastener manufacturers, an efficient batch size is around 35,000 units. But the analysis team found that large numbers of fasteners are needed in very small batch sizes. In more than 5,000 occasions on each aircraft, just 34 fasteners of a particular type are needed. Boeing’s forecasting model shows that tale repeated throughout each shipset. The volume rises to the 5,600 level of discrete Boeing code numbers on only 1-10 instances per aircraft.


As it looked outside its own walls, Boeing saw that the rest of the industry was also in trouble. “Globally, there was a shortage of approximately 110 million hi-lock fasteners, a key component of aircraft assembly,” WDI says. That shortage is expected to continue into 2012 even with best executed mitigation strategies.



Let us do your shopping

From all of this, Boeing’s leadership team developed a six-step Fastener Procurement Model (FPM) that centered on a buy-re-sell philosophy. Under it, Boeing would be the central purchasing entity for the entire 787 supply chain. The idea was to improved delivery rates and lower costs.


To create pull in this supply chain, the company uses consumption based ordering (CBO) based on a daily upload into the Boeing web portal of fastener inventory from the entire 787 supply chain. The goal was to increase visibility for better forecasting.


Partners were briefed and the FPM team expanded to include Jill Christenson as a program manager and Mark Cantu as a senior supply chain analyst. Martin was recruited as its full-time manager.


In early 2008, the FPM management team added procurement agents, CBO experts and additional management. Suppliers were surveyed on their warehouse stocking, production floor inventory and IT systems and rated on a five-level maturity scale. Only one rated higher than two with five being optimum.


As they evaluated whether to join the FPM, suppliers worried about some of its specifics, such as single supplies for certain types of fasteners. Boeing chose that approach to cut costs. Suppliers offered their own choices of alternate suppliers, but Boeing would not guarantee that the alternates would be used.



Catch-22 and skepticism
Boeing’s hope was that with widespread participation the FPM could drive down fastener prices. But volume levels could not be determined until the number of participants were known. But their suppliers would not know if the program was worthwhile with a price comparison.


Many of Boeing’s fastener suppliers welcomed the company’s CBO program because of the visibility it gave them to demand. Allfast CEO Jim Randall told WDI that it received orders ranging from 32 lb. to 15,000 lb. with multiple releases for solid skin rivets. “Looking at the distribution on order quantities [over 200 shipments], only two quantities were ordered more than twice,” he said. CBO allowed Allfast to smooth out its manufacturing process and reduce overall costs.


That kind of success led the manufacturers to pressure their distributors to adopt Boeing’s CBO system. But distributors were reluctant, not wanting to share their information with the manufacturers.


In early 2008, Boeing sent a request for proposal to fastener makers for a family of fasteners at several volume levels on behalf of itself and its suppliers. Most manufacturers would not bid, saying Boeing’s demand was unreasonably high or the manufacturer already was under contact to one of the Tier-1 partners. “To us, this RFP went too far, too fast,” Randall said.


That reaction caused a further deep-dive by the FPM team into the fine points of fastener distribution and a trip to southern California – ground zero for the majority of aerospace fasteners – to learn more.


That brought Byrne and Feliberti to the Tauber Institute to present a critique of the FPM model as it was being applied to Boeing’s Tier-1 partners and to develop a plan for Tier-2 manufacturers.


Push back
Meanwhile, the first phase implementation of FPM was experiencing push-back from within Boeing, where middle managers were skeptical of the plan’s chances for success. Feliberti says senior managers could have helped by making clear their commitment to the plan.


“What started out as an effort to ensure the availability of fasteners turned into something completely different,” he said.


Boeing’s structures group, which manages contractual relationships with fuselage partners, was skeptical because the suppliers were paid on an agreed-upon price for an entire shipset delivery, not a bill of materials. The group worried that opening up these contracts to include the FPM would lead to other demands.


Also skeptical was Boeing’s Materials Management Organization, which felt material flow was not sufficiently fleshed out in the FPM.


The result is that Boeing has found it hard to quantify the benefits of FPM against its costs and faces the risk that its partners will simply write it off. It isn’t clear how Boeing will manage the value sharing it expects to receive with 787 partners.


“The fear right now is that because of this economic downturn, fastener manufacturers will take capacity offline,” Byrne says. “However, once production picks up again, we’ll have the same problem that we had before. That’s why it’s all the more important that we get the FPM running.”

Second Boeing 787 Dreamliner Completes First Flight




The second Boeing 787 Dreamliner, ZA002, completed its first flight today. The all-new airplane, which features the livery of the Dreamliner's launch customer, ANA (All Nippon Airways) of Japan, took off from Paine Field in Everett, completed a two-hour flight and landed at Boeing Field in Seattle.
"We are delighted that the second Dreamliner is in the livery of our launch customer, ANA," said Scott Fancher, vice president and general manager of the 787 program. "We are honored by the airline's support and look forward to delivering ANA the first production airplane next year."
Captain Randy Neville was at the controls for the flight, with Chief Pilot Mike Carriker operating as co-pilot. Neville and Carriker took the airplane to an altitude of 13,000 feet (3,962 m) and an airspeed of 200 knots, or about 230 miles (370 km) per hour. The airplane took off at 9:09 a.m. PST and landed at 11:10 a.m. PST.
This is the second of six 787s being used in the airplane's flight-test program. Each of the airplanes will be used for a specific set of tests, with this airplane focusing on systems performance. Like its predecessor, ZA001, the airplane is powered by two Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines.
"We would like to convey our sincere congratulations to the Boeing team for its achievement of this milestone, and we look forward to the delivery into our fleet next year," said Shinichiro Ito, president and CEO of ANA.

Explanation and clarification on ZA002's landing gear

As you may have noticed, ZA002 touched down at Boeing Field with its landing gears doors open instead of stowed as we saw on ZA001 last Tuesday. The reason for the open position at the time of landing had to do with the resolution Neville and Carriker used to fully straighten a component of the nose landing gear.
The Seattle Times has reported that "Part of the gear assembly "was tilted to the aft by 15 degrees."

Specifically the part in question was the nose landing gear drag brace that, according to an airline pilot who holds type ratings on both the 757 and 767 and flies for a major US carrier, a drag brace "braces the airplane [landing gear] gear when a rearward load placed on the gear. This will help prevent gear collapse under higher than normal load situations."

Boeing says the telemetry room, or TM, noticed a conflict in the readings on the nose landing gear and asked for a visual inspection by the T-33 chase plane.

The chase plane reported that the nose landing gear drag brace was "not completely straight," adding "there's about a 15 degree angle to it."

Neville cycled the landing gear doors and later the landing gear a few times to try and properly align the drag brace.

The crew ultimately selected the Alternate Gear extension option which unlocked the nose and main landing gear doors, dropping the landing gear into position, resolving the issue, and explains why we saw the doors open on arrival. Additionally, the use of the ALTN GEAR option ensured that any potentially unresolved issue with the nose gear would not be an issue on touchdown.
It's quite common to see a 777 making an approach to KPAE after a production test flight with the landing gear doors open, such a condition is a common occurrence during a test flight and even more common during the first flight of a new aircraft. Ultimately, while this minor issue was encountered, the redundancy in the landing gear system was tested successfully in flight.

Naturally, the gear was inspected after landing and the system will obviously be tested once again when ZA002 flies again. One anomaly on a first flight is hardly indicative of a larger issue. If this same problem is found in the other test aircraft, then that would be something requiring a larger change, but there's absolutely no evidence to support that after just five hours and six minutes of flying the 787.