First KC-390 gets wings on assembly line

By: STEPHEN TRIMBLE, published in flightglobal.com, Sep 24, 2014

Embraer has moved the wing and sponsons of the first KC-390 into place on the assembly line, the Brazilian manufacturer has revealed.

The company’s third photo update of the tanker-transport posted online shows the programme continues to make progress, but it still has much work to do before a scheduled first flight by year-end.

Embraer

The latest picture, released on 23 September, is framed in such a way that it obscures any view of the aft fuselage, so it is not clear whether the aircraft’s vertical and horizontal stabilisers have been integrated.

Although International Aero Engines delivered the V2500-E5 turbofans for the aircraft in August, the picture shows that they have not yet been installed under the wings. Embraer also has yet to install the radome, the windows for the flightdeck and panel coverings over the forward avionics component.

The release of the photo on 23 September follows an emerging pattern. Embraer released its first picture of an unpainted, wingless fuselage on the assembly line on 22 May. This was followed two months later with a new photo showing a painted fuselage with landing gear attached, but still wingless and tailless.

Embraer has revealed a 25 October target to conduct the roll-out of the KC-390, which is scheduled to achieve first flight by year-end and certification in the first half of 2016.

The Brazilian air force has ordered 28 of the type, and the project has also attracted commitments from five more countries to potentially order another 32.

s this the new Concorde? World’s first supersonic business jet will cost £60m, fly at 1,217mph and travel between London and New York in just THREE hours

By:EMILY PAYNE, published in dailymail.co.uk, Sep 25, 2014

Airbus is teaming up with US-based Aerospace firm Aerion to create a supersonic jet that can fly from London to New York in three hours and from Los Angeles to Tokyo in six.

The Aerion AS2 business jet will fly at 1,217 mph, using proprietary supersonic laminar flow technology – almost as fast as Concorde, which flew at 1,350 mph.

The two companies announced this week that they will be joining forces on the project, sharing ‘capabilities in design, manufacturing and certification’.

Engineers from Airbus’ Defence and Space Division will work with Aerion at its base in Reno, Nevada.

The cost of the AS2 is thought to be more than $100million – over £60million – and Aerion hopes test flights will begin by 2019.

The jet, which will fly between major global cities, will be made mostly from carbon fibre composite material.

The cost of the AS2 is thought to be more than $100million – over £60million – and test flights will begin by 2019

Design features include wings which reduce overall drag by 20 per cent, allowing for lower fuel consumption and longer range and a luxurious 30-foot-long cabin will seat up to 12 passengers.

Aerion chairman Robert M. Bass, said in a statement: ‘This is a major step forward for Aerion. It puts us solidly on track toward our objective of certifying the world’s first supersonic business jet in 2021.’

After 27 years of service, British Airways retired the Airbus’ Concorde airliner – which travelled at more than twice the speed of sound –  in Ocotber 2003, signalling the end of the supersonic passenger jet.

Interior: A 30-foot-long cabin will seat up to 12 passengers in business-style comfort

Modern commercial long-haul jets typically cruise at speeds between 480 and 560 mph

The plan is to certify the plane in 2021 with first delivery in 2022. Flight testing would begin in roughly 2019.

Aerion officials knew it would take a well-established original equipment manufacturer to complete the project, he said.

‘We couldn’t be more delighted with the choice of Airbus,’ Barents said. ‘We think that their footprint around the world is clearly going to help us as we develop the airplane.’

+3

Flight testing could begin on the supersonic jet as early as 2019 with it becoming available in 2021

Billionaire Bass has been open about his personal mission to offer the first business jet to fly faster than the speed of sound, a project begun in 2002.

Aerion, Chief Executive Officer Doug Nichols, told CNN:’The collaboration with Airbus was an essential piece in order to bring the expertise of a premier aircraft development concern into the fold.’

The U.S. forbids civilian planes from  the sound barrier – about 750 mph per hour – while flying overland due to noisy sonic booms, but the AS2 model will fly at subsonic speeds until it reaches the ocean, when it will speed up. Over Europe it can fly at supersonic speeds without detection.

GEnx misses fuel burn spec on 787, but on upgrade path

By: STEPHEN TRIMBLE, published in flightglobal.com, Sep 23, 2014

One month before Boeing returned the 787-8 to flight in May 2013 after an 18-week grounding caused by battery fires, GE Aviation quietly certificated the third major production version of the GEnx-1B, inching one of the two propulsion options for the Dreamliner closer to the promised fuel efficiency targets.

Similar to the rival Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engine, the original Block 4 version of the GEnx-1B entered service with Air India in early 2012 several percentage points below the specification. The Block 4 standard also featured an under-performing low-pressure turbine (LPT) section that would require a redesign.

As of early September, GE had delivered 246 GEnx-1B engines, including the last 150 built to the performance improvement package (PIP) II standard. That number includes the first GEnx-1B-powered 787-9 delivered to United Airlines on 4 September, the last major certification campaign until the arrival of the 787-10 in four years.

With tens of thousands of hours and now two applications in service, GE now understands exactly how close the PIP II standard came to meeting Boeing’s specification – and it is not as close as was once widely expected.

“We’re probably off the original ‘spec’ by perhaps a little more than 1% but less than 2%,” says John How, business operations leader of the GEnx product line for GE Aviation.

Boeing

Importantly, the upgraded engines delivered after Block 4 was phased out of the production system meet contractual guarantees for airlines, How says.

“What matters to the airline customer is what they were sold by Boeing and what they were guaranteed,” How says.

Even the latest GEnx PIP-II engine installed on the United 787-9 delivered earlier this month, however, falls short of Boeing’s original promise to airlines. Judging by GE’s lead over R-R in the787 order backlog, the performance of the Trent engine has not been enough to usurp the GEnx.

The Trent and GEnx performance shortfalls were apparent well before either version was delivered to a customer. A leaked Airbus dossier on the 787 in 2008 included the prediction that both engines would miss the specification by 2-3%. As the original Trent 1000 and Block 4 entered service, the 3% shortfall became the baseline estimate used by both companies.

GE and R-R then designed a series of performance upgrades to reclaim the specification target. R-R has already rolled out Package B and C standards, with the final 1000-TEN configuration scheduled to appear in 2016.

GE, meanwhile, followed the Block 4 standard with the PIP 1 design, which included a revised LPT. GE had introduced lightweight titanium-aluminide blades in the LPT section of the GEnx engine, believing it could reduce the blade count significantly and lower the weight of the engine compared with the preceding GE90.

That estimate proved to be too aggressive by about 30% of the LPT blades that would ultimately be required to manage the airflow. The PIP 1 programme corrected the error with a more robust LPT blade count.

GE advertised that the PIP I would reclaim 1.4-1.6 percentage points of the 3% performance shortfall from the specification. A second upgrade – the PIP II design – was supposed to push the performance to nearly match Boeing’s original fuel burn target. With the LPT improved by the PIP 1 programme, GE now focused on improving the high-pressure compressor section in the PIP II design.

In previous statements, GE had indicated the PIP II configuration was coming within 1% of the specification target for fuel burn efficiency. That estimate proved illusory, however. GE has now recalculated the actual performance results, with the new figures showing the Block 4 missed the specification by 4-5%. With the PIP II standard, fuel burn efficiency improves by 3 percentage points, but remains 1-2% shy of the specification.

GE

GE officials emphasise that the performance will continue to improve as the new upgrades enter the fleet. They point to the record of the GE90-115B, the engine that powers the 777-300ER. That engine also entered service slightly below Boeing’s specification for fuel burn. Ten years later, it is now running more than 3% above the specification, according to GE’s numbers.

Despite the shortfall, there is no “PIP-3” version being proposed for the GEnx-1B. Instead, GE will introduce improvements gradually leveraging engine development programmes launched after the GEnx was unveiled in 2003 with a then-state-of-the-art 45:1 compression ratio. GE is currently testing a compressor section for the GE9X that will power the 777X with a 61:1 compression ratio.

Key enabling technologies, such as ceramic matrix composites, have already been tested in the core of a GEnx engine, as part of GE’s campaign to mature the technologies for the CFM InternationalLeap engine and the GE9X.

As GE works to improve the GEnx-1B’s fuel performance, the company is also looking at adding more thrust capability. The engine is already able to produce 78,000lb thrust (111kN) at sea level, a power reserve well beyond the needs of the 787-8 and 787-9. It is expected, however, to allow the 787-10 to take off with a full payload at high-altitude runways or in very hot weather. The standard rating for the 787-10 is 76,000lb thrust, with a 2,000lb thrust margin for “high-hot” conditions.

GE is now studying an even more powerful version of the GEnx, which would raise maximum thrust at sea level to 80,000lb. Although Boeing has not publicly discussed a requirement for such an engine -– perhaps to power a high-gross-weight version of the 787-10 – GE is preparing “in case the airplane needs increased thrust”, How says.

An increase in thrust often involves a wider inlet diameter, as more airflow is needed to produce more power efficiently. But there are ways to avoid a wider engine exterior. The PIP-II configuration, in fact, includes a 12.7mm (0.5in) wider flow path, without changing the exterior diameter.

“Thrust increase always involves more airflow,” How says. “As to whether or not we would need to increase the diameter of the fan, that’s not really decided.”

More efficiency and more power are not the only items on the list of improvements for the GEnx-1B engine.

Boeing and GE are close to clearing one of the most bothersome operational restrictions for certain operators, such as Japan Air Lines. The GEnx-1B has proved susceptible to a phenomenon unique to tropical clients called ice crystal ingestion. In tropical latitudes, small ice crystals can form at high altitudes, potentially causing damage to the engines. The GEnx-1B is currently restricted from flying within 50nm (93km) of weather in which ice crystals are able to form. As a result, JAL has replaced 787s with 777s on two routes to Vietnam and India.

“We think by the end of October Boeing will be able to issue a revision to that flight restriction, increasing the altitude limit significantly,” How says.

The solution to the problem requires no changes to the turbo machinery. Instead, GE has reprogrammed the software controlling the variable bleed valves located in front of the compressor section. These valves are normally opened on take-off or landing, siphoning potentially damaging objects sucked in by the fan into the bypass flow. The reprogramming allows these valves to open when conditions suggest ice crystals are forming on the blades.

Morris explains how GE came to embrace 3D printing

By: STEPHEN TRIMBLE, published in flightglobal.com, Sep 24, 2014

GE Aviation has spent decades building a reputation as a materials trailblazer in the engines business.

The Cincinnati-based engine maker has consistently turned to new and sometimes exotic materials to solve engineering problems. As modern engines have driven up bypass and compression ratios to become more fuel efficient, GE has introduced carbonfibre fan blades to reduce the weight of wider fans and integrated titanium aluminide turbine blades and ceramic matrix composite (CMC) turbine shrouds to survive in higher temperatures.

Despite this reliable track record, industry peers still seemed caught off guard and unguardedly sceptical about GE’s sudden and deep plunge into the emerging world of additive manufacturing. Like the widespread introduction of composite materials in the 1990s, additive manufacturing inserts both new materials and a new production process far removed from industrial age practices like forging and casting.

The speed and scale of GE’s embrace of 3D printed parts seems unprecedented. It took the industry decades of experimentation before allowing composite materials to be used in load-bearing structures, starting with the rudder of the Airbus A310 and increasing gradually over the next four decades.

Even as most aerospace companies still limit 3D printers to rapid prototyping shops and one-off plastic components, GE is opening a 9,290m2 (100,000ft2) factory in Alabama to produce a key component in every CFM International Leap engine, with annual production of up to 40,000 pieces a year. The same factory and another facility recently erected in Italy also could produce an even more numerous part on the GE9X, GE’s highly prized power source for the Boeing 777X family.

GE

Most aerospace industry officials agree that additive manufacturing will be revolutionary, but not for at least 20 years. GE is revolutionising its manufacturing system now, with billions of orders at stake on every Boeing 737, Comac C919 and CFM-powered Airbus A320 in the backlog.

Although it appeared that GE emerged as the industry’s lonely champion of additive manufacturing overnight, the real story unfolded over several decades, with a starring role played by an industrial neighbour in Cincinnati with no background in the aerospace manufacturing business.

Greg Morris comes from a Cincinnati family that presided over a large steel distribution company since the mid-19th century. The family business was sold, however, in the early 1990s, leaving Morris with plenty of capital and nothing to do.

Over the next 20 years, the company he founded with two others – Morris Technologies – would help transform additive manufacturing from a niche technique to make one-off prototypes into a mainstream production system for some of the world’s most advanced aircraft engines.

Morris Technologies began in 1994 with the acquisition of a 3D Systems SLA-250, the first 3D laser printer on the market. The system was advanced for its time, but still limited to building fragile materials.

“At that point the resins were okay but they not robust at all,” Morris says. “In fact, you could drop it from here to the table and it would likely break.”

Despite the limitations, such early 3D printers transformed rapid prototyping operations. For the first time, an engineer with a 3D computer-aided design (CAD) drawing could make parts from scratch within hours, without the need to order raw materials, invest in new tooling and tie up machinists.

Moving from rapid prototyping into mainstream production would take nearly a decade of further development. Even as 3D printers became more powerful and the resins more robust, such systems were still comparatively unsophisticated compared to mainstream production tools like computer numerical control machines.

Not only would such a system have to precisely manufacture thousands of parts with close tolerances reliably and affordably, the machines would also need to monitor themselves, alerting operators of anything unexpected. Ideally, the machine would sense small fluctuations in the power supply to the laser, or perhaps minute changes in atmospheric pressure inside the printing chamber.

Obtaining machines with such potential became possible about a decade ago, but only with significant alterations. On a visit in 2003 to a UK facility of a key client – Cincinnati-based Proctor & Gamble – Morris discovered the direct metal laser sintering machine made by Munich-based EOS.

At the time, Morris Technologies was still a start-up company with a broad range of clients spanning GE’s rapid prototyping shop, medical devices and consumer products. Buying the EOS machine, however, was still a big risk. Their intention was to acquire the machine and modify it substantially to suit a more sophisticated clientele, and thereby void the warranty and the guarantee for EOS support on the machine.

“We went over to Germany, we researched it and then we took the plunge,” Morris recalls.

That decision would set in motion a path to make highly sophisticated direct parts using exotic metals, such as the cobalt-chromium discs at the base of an engine fuel nozzle, where tiny perforations and channels blend kerosene and highly compressed air in a precisely calibrated mixture before it is ignited in the combustion chamber.

By 2005, Morris Technologies had upgraded the direct laser sintering machine from a carbon dioxide-based laser to a fibre-optic laser. The more powerful laser allowed the company to start working with more exotic metals, including cobalt-chromium, Inconel 718, Inconel 626 and various titanium and aluminium alloys.

Other modifications focused on controlling the environment inside the printing chamber. Consumers can buy 3D printers with a guarantee of 10,000 oxygen parts per million inside the printing chamber. The best manufacturing machines available on the market offer better quality, limiting oxygen to 2,000 parts per million. The Morris Technologies machines are rated to maintain an atmosphere of 50 parts per million.

Other manufactures are using 3D printed parts as support structures in engines, such as brackets. It is also commonly used for serpentine-like ventilation ducts in aircraft. Some industry officials, such as Pratt & Whitney vice-president of technology and environment Alan Epstein, have challenged the “hype” over additive manufacturing techniques, arguing that the technology will not be ready for widespread application for another 20 years.

But Morris argues that the naysayers simply have not been working on the technology as long or made the same investments in improving the commercially available machines.

“It’s very expensive. It takes millions of dollars to develop your material curves,” Morris says. “We have probably a much better understanding of the technology and the material characteristics than others who have either gone down that road or haven’t been playing with the technology as long as we have.”

In 2012, GE acquired Morris Technologies shortly after revealing that each of the 19 fuel nozzles inside each Leap engine would be manufactured with a cobalt-chrome tip.

The design of a fuel nozzle made by the Morris Technologies machines presented challenges. Engineers assessed a “debit” on the low- and high-cycle fatigue properties of the original part, a characteristic caused by using laser sintering to produce it, rather than a casting.

“What our engineers and designers did is they designed around that debit, and that’s the beauty of what you can do with this technology,” Morris says. “Instead of letting a debit… cause a roadblock they simply designed around it.”

If GE’s strategy works, this is only the beginning. Additive manufacturing opens doors to more than just new designs and new materials, Morris says. It also allows GE’s engineers to design something like a turbine blade very differently, with several layers of material optimised for their location on the blade. Right now, a turbine blade is made with a single material, even though blending different materials could be more effective.

“What if in a high-pressure turbine blade instead of it being one material I can vary my materials in the future, and I can use one material here, blend in the next material and at the tip I get an abrasion resistant material,” Morris says. “That’s coming. That’s work that GE is on the leading edge of understanding fundamentally how to do.”

A320neo makes maiden flight

Published in flightglobal.com, Sep 25, 2014

The Airbus A320neo has made its maiden flight, taking off from Toulouse at just past noon Central European Time. Pratt & Whitney PW1100G-JM-powered MSN6101 carried a crew of five. The type, also to be available with CFM International’s new Leap Engine, promises to cut fuel burn by 20% compared to standard A320s, owing to the new generation engines and aerodynamic improvements including Airbus’s sharklet wingtip extensions.

Airbus

To date, firm orders for the NEO stand at 3,257 aircraft from 60 customers.

Malaysia’s first A400M takes shape

By: GREG WALDRON, published in flightglobal.com, Sep 23, 2014

Airbus Defence and Space has released an image of the Malaysian air force’s first A400M tactical transport, and says the aircraft will be delivered in the first quarter of 2015.

The wing, tail plane, cockpit, fuselage and landing-gear have been joined in Seville, Spain and are ready for ground-testing, says Airbus in a statement.

Delivery in the first quarter of 2015 should allow the aircraft to attend Malaysia’s biennial Langkawi International Maritime & Aerospace Exhibition that runs from 17-21 March.

Malaysian pilots are in Europe training to operate the type. They will be joined by maintenance engineers and technicians in the coming weeks, says Airbus.

Malaysia, the only Asia Pacific customer for the A400M, has four examples on order. Airbus says it will receive three aicraft in 2015, and the final one in 2016.

Airbus Defence and Space

Al Jazeera Investigate: Boeing’s ‘Dreamliner’ by the numbers

Published in aljazeera.com, Sep 10, 2014

Al Jazeera Investigate: Interview – The former Boeing union president

Published in aljazeera.com, Sep 10, 2014

Former Boeing engineer and union president Cynthia Cole speaks out about her concerns with the 787 “Dreamliner”.

Cynthia Cole worked at Boeing as a Test Engineer from 1978 to 2010. She was president of the union for Boeing technical employees and engineers, SPEEA, from April 2006 to March 2010. At that time, SPEEA represented around 25,000 Boeing employees, many of whom were developing the “Dreamliner”. Below are extended extracts from an interview she gave to Al Jazeera in early 2014.

I have to say that until the last few years, I truly enjoyed my whole career at the Boeing Company.

For me, the biggest change came with the McDonnell Douglas merger. All the processes and procedures that we had as a heritage Boeing Company were slowly changing and becoming the McDonnell Douglas process or the McDonnell Douglas procedure.

I felt it was wrong. I felt it was going to take the company in the wrong direction. I thought that quality would suffer and the integrity of the product would suffer. Anybody I know that’s a heritage Boeing employee has said the same kind of things.

The 787 business model

---

I disagreed with the whole business model for the 787. In fact, I was at Renton Town Hall… – I’m president of the union – to observe. One of the engineering managers on the 787 was doing this Renton town hall [meeting] and he’s addressing all these questions.

I raised my hand to speak. The person with the microphone gave me the microphone. I said, “Well, you know, here’s the problem with the 787 model. We’re turning a bunch of companies that were vendors and suppliers into partners. The problem with being a partner is there’s only one Boeing Company in the whole world. They’re not the Boeing Company or we wouldn’t need to be the Boeing Company. No one does engineering the way Boeing does. These people, these companies that are now the partners, they’re not Boeing, and they’re not doing the job to the standards that we would expect because they aren’t the Boeing Company. That’s the bottom line.”

The people in the audience at that time, they cheered because it resonated with all the engineers in that room.

‘You’ve got to do something’

---

I would be out in the public, and I’d be at various stores, and Boeing employees who actually worked on the 787 would come up to me. They recognised who I was and said, “You’ve got to do something”.

I think there was a lot of pressure to get the programme done on schedule, and engineering was no longer in charge. – Cynthia Cole

Of course, I’m thinking, oh, great. What am I supposed to do? They come up to me and say, “My supervisor’s not listening to me. I know about problems on the 787 that aren’t being addressed. My supervisor just says, ‘I can’t talk to you about this because I’ve got to keep this part of the programme on schedule. And if I have to stop to deal with what you think is a problem, then I’m going to be in trouble.'”

I actually went to Everett a couple of times and toured the facilities and talked to people on the factory floor. They’re all singing the same song. That’s when I started asking for a meeting where I was talking to Boeing managers.

That was unheard of, for someone on a programme to talk to someone who’s not on their programme and to voice concerns and to say that they’re not being listened to. That was just not the Boeing Company that I’d worked for all these years. It was raising red flags in my mind.

At first, I didn’t believe it. When a few people came up to me, I thought, okay, maybe they just don’t get along with their supervisor. I just kind of blew a few of them off and said, “Okay. Well, I’ll look into that and do what I can.”

Then, the more I heard it, the more I thought, “Oh, my, gosh”. It wasn’t the same person. This was all different people. I’d get email on my Boeing email system saying, “I’d really like to talk with you”, or “I see problems on the programme and no one’s addressing them”.

Cross-talks

---

That’s when I started asking to have these meetings. My idea was one top engineering manager just to stand in front of a group of SPEEA members who were engineers and technical employees on the programme, and then have somebody from HR in front with a flip-board and just write down everything they say.

I think the first meeting went for an hour and a half. The poor little HR guy standing there, he just wrote and wrote and wrote.

I mean, I’m president of the entire union. I’m not being approached by members on other programmes. It’s only this programme, the 787, that I’m having all of these people come up to me. They’re all SPEEA members. They’re all either engineers or technical employees. And so I’m believing now that there’s something going on. They’re not being listened to. I think it has something to do with this outsourcing and having all these partners take over the work.

Then, I went to the hangar in Everett and found out that a lot of the work that was coming in from the partners wasn’t being done to the standards that they were expecting, so the quality assurance people would not allow it on the plane. And so as the plane was being built, these things would have to be fixed. It was piling up.

I think there was a lot of pressure to get the programme done on schedule, and engineering was no longer in charge.

The business model was in charge, and the business model of partners and outsourcing.

These are engineering programmes. This is why these planes fly and why they work, because of engineers and engineering. Not because of the business model, and not because of the finance structure, and not because of all these other hoops and whistles, and the stock price, and the board of directors, whatever you want to call it.

It’s the engineers; it’s the engineering. If you don’t do that right, you haven’t got anything.

Proprietary information

---

So if a part is a vendor part, then Boeing owns it. Boeing has all the drawings. They know everything about that part. They get everything.

If it’s a partner, then I was over at the customer service centre and that’s where some SPEEA members were saying, “We’re kind of concerned because some of these parts that come from the partners, they’re giving us their drawings and they’re proprietary. We’ll see their box and we’ll see what goes into their box and what comes out of their box, but we don’t know what’s in the box. It’s just marked proprietary.”

It’s marked proprietary because these partners, they own it, and it’s their proprietary part.

If you want to troubleshoot a problem on an aircraft and if you’re poring through the drawings to figure it out and you think the problem is in that box, you’re not going to know.

They were feeling that their hands were tied because they said, “You know, we’ve got pieces of this aircraft that we really don’t know a whole lot about. We can’t do our normal job.” That concerned them.

As a Boeing employee, I would have more confidence in the aircraft and feel better about it if we had done our normal Boeing processes. It’s the unknown of some of these pieces that we don’t really have full control over.

Al Jazeera Investigate : Interview – The fired engineer

Published in aljazeera.com, Sep 10, 2014

In September 2009, Boeing hired John Woods as a Manufacturing Engineer at its 787 “Dreamliner” factory in Charleston, South Carolina.

Just over a year later, Boeing fired him. The company said he was working too slowly.

Woods said he was fired for raising safety concerns. He filed a whistleblower complaint with the US aviation safety regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), alleging seven serious violations. The FAA substantiated only one of the seven: that Boeing used “inadequate manufacturing planning documents that lacked revision control and were missing inspection steps”.

Woods also appealed to Boeing’s Ethics Department, claiming he was being harassed. After 91 days, Boeing rejected his complaint. The Labor Court upheld the company.

A worker has 90 days from the point at which they believe they have been retaliated against to make a complaint with the Department of Labor. For Woods, because he had waited for Boeing’s Ethics Department, he could not turn to the Department of Labor.

At the time he was hired, Woods had declared to Boeing that he had psychiatric conditions: Attention Deficit Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and mild depression.

The words below are taken from an interview recorded with Mr Woods in 2014.

Working for Boeing

---

I was very proud to be working at Boeing, the biggest and best commercial aircraft manufacturer in the world and to have the opportunity to work on the first all-composite fuselage for a commercial aircraft. I drank the Boeing Kool-Aid. I was thrilled to be there. Every time the store came around, I bought all my souvenirs.

I was hired to focus on repair of the carbon epoxy material whenever it’s damaged or whenever there’s a manufacturing defect. If there’s damage, we have to remove the material and replace the material to the point where it’s at least as strong as its original design. I was the first manufacturing engineer that was to be dedicated to that position.

I would write the work instructions for the technicians on the floor to how to do the repair.

Quality and production

---

There was some animosity between quality and production. I would bring up a quality concern and they would say, well, that’s not helpful to production.

In a couple of meetings, there were several … managers screaming at me to dumb down my work instruction. – John Woods

On several occasions, I would go check out these repairs while they were being done and after. There are inspection points all throughout the repair process where an inspector is supposed to come over and check something and mark it down that he checked it.

You’re never supposed to go past an operation that’s not checked off. I would see a defect and I’ll look at the inspection sheet and there was no note of it, and I know in the specifications that all anomalies, even small anomalies, are supposed to be recorded in the inspection.

So I would bring an inspector over and show it to him and say, “Could you please note this down in your inspection?” And they say okay, so I’d walk away. Then I’d come back later that day or the next day and it’s still not noted.

So then I would go mention it to the supervisor and go back another couple of days and still not noted. It became very frustrating on several occasions, to the point where people were angry at me for bringing it up.

Dumbing down

---

In a couple of meetings, there were several, a group of managers screaming at me to dumb down my work instruction.

And then when it hit the floor, there was pushback because they don’t want to do all this extra work, so then they come back to me and ask me to – that I put too much in there and I need to dumb it down.

The requirements that I had in there were supposed to be in there. The specifications tell you what the requirements are and you have to tell the technicians what the requirements are.

You have to identify what are the key requirements that are significant enough to put in your work instructions, and sometimes the spec will say that you may do something or you shall do something or you must do something, so just things like that go into your judgment on whether or not – how important it is.

Concerned

---

Given what I’ve seen, working at the South Carolina plant, doing structural repairs for the Boeing 787, I definitely would be concerned about flying on it myself. I don’t feel safe flying on the 787.

There’s no doubt there are bad repairs going out the door on the 787 aircraft.

I am worried that sooner or later, there’s going to be a structural failure on the fuselage.

These are structural parts, and this is a jumbo jet carrying a couple of hundred human beings, and the structural fuselage has to be solid. The nature of composite materials is the damage grows, and then eventually you get failure. In my view, sooner or later, there will be a fuselage event on the 787 I’m guessing within a couple of years, but that’s just a guess.

I’m concerned about flying on that aircraft. When you know how many times it’s been repaired before it’s even delivered to the customer, you don’t realise that you’re buying damaged. Your aircraft has been damaged and repaired already when you think it’s new.

Fired

---

I had written a repair work instruction for repairing the stringers. They started using it, and then they realised it’s got these new requirements.

They’re telling me I wrote too good of a procedure, so to speak, that’s got too much requirements in it that doesn’t all need to be in there. And they got very upset, even standing up by their chairs and yelling at me.They were furious because they had expected me to take the stuff out already.

A week later, I was terminated.

The subject matter of the [FAA] complaint was my own area. And when it came back from the FAA with only substantiating one of my seven points, I was very surprised because I know I could’ve myself substantiated all of them, but it’ll be easy for me because that was my subject matter. But I certainly expected a lot more than one to be substantiated. In fact, one is kind of a joke.

Speaking out

---

My reasons for speaking out about the quality problems on the 787 are because I’m truly concerned about the manufacturing quality of this first-of-a-kind composite aircraft.

Boeing did not have adequate quality controls in place when it comes to repairing structural composites. I wasn’t going to let that continue on my watch.

They encourage you to speak out, and where did it get me? It got me fired.

So instead of saying thanks for doing a good job, because I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, I had to leave in shame really. I was embarrassed with my own family.

Six weeks since I’ve been terminated, and then here I am unemployed with termination on my record. And I have to try to find someone to hire me after being fired from Boeing and it’s very hard to do. It took me a year-and-a-half.

It shouldn’t be this hard to do the right thing.

Al Jazeera Investigates: The ‘fake’ Boeing 787 rollout

By: Kevin Hirten, published in aljazeera.com, Sep 10, 2014

On the surface, Boeing’s now infamous rollout of the 787 “Dreamliner” seemed planned to perfection. It was a well-coordinated event of global scale; huge crowds, great weather and US celebrity news man Tom Brokaw acting as master of ceremonies. Even the date was perfect: July 8, 2007, 7-8-7 for those in the US.

“If you could have sat there with me to feel the pride, to see the faces of those machinists and those engineers,” says former Washington State governor Christine Gregoire, who was sitting in the front row with the Boeing leaders. “It was a very proud day.”

Boeing invited aviation industry analyst Richard Aboulafia with his wife. “It was a lovely setting, fantastic party afterwards,” he told Al Jazeera. “This is one of those pivotal moments in American industrial history. It was really a terrific feeling to be there at the time.”

When the big moment came, the guest of honor, the “Dreamliner”, didn’t disappoint. “They opened the doors of this giant assembly bay, and there it is sitting in the sun, and we all streamed outside and we all touched it,” says Seattle Times aerospace reporter Dominic Gates.

It was the public’s first glimpse of 787. To most, it looked perfect, at least on the surface.
‘Just a shell’

---

“What I realised walking around it is that you could look up in the wheel well and you could see daylight coming through the cabin,” says Jon Ostrower, now of the Wall Street Journal. “Studying photos later on, I realized the doors were made of plywood. The airplane just wasn’t finished.”

At the time, Ostrower was a young aviation blogger working for Flight International Magazine. He didn’t get the chance to attend with the rest of the media. He was there as the guest of a Boeing engineer who liked his blog. So while the other reporters were busy filing stories, Ostrower was spending time with the plane. “During that hour, I had a chance to really kind of study it. Without any chaperone or minder or anything, I just had a chance to really kind of just study the details. And it wasn’t done,” says Ostrower.

The plane that was set to fly in two months wasn’t done. It was Ostrower’s reporting that would lead the way in revealing what was really going on with the 787 “Dreamliner”.

If you study video and photographs of the event carefully, you can see light streaming through the passenger windows into the airplane, revealing there is no cockpit and no wall separating the cockpit from the passenger bay.

For the workers, the problems were obvious. “We knew that the plane was just kind of a shell and empty. So for us, it’s kind of like you’re showing something that’s not done, it’s not ready,” says Shannon Ryker, a Boeing machinist.

“Anybody, even a rank amateur, could have walked — well, they couldn’t have walked through the airplane because there weren’t even floorboards to stand on.” says Kevin Sanders, an employee at Boeing for 30 years. “But if they could have walked through it, they would have seen that there were no systems, there was no environmental control system, no wiring, no hydraulics, no plumbing. There was nothing.”

‘In pieces’

---

Former Boeing engineer Stan Sorscher saw the plane shortly before it made its world debut. “Anybody looking at the airplane would know that there’s no chance that this thing is going to fly. It’s got nothing in it.”

What I realised walking around it is that you could look up in the wheel well and you could see daylight coming through the cabin. – Jon Ostrower, Wall Street Journal

Inside the factory, there was a scramble to salvage the situation. Hours after the rollout, the plane was in pieces. “Every panel came off the airplane. It got taken off its landing gear. The tail was taken off. It was a mad dash. It was an absolute mad dash to the first flight,” says Jon Ostrower.

The 787 business model, designed to save Boeing money, was backfiring. Many parts were coming in from hundreds of global suppliers either incomplete or incorrect. The workers in Everett couldn’t put the plane together properly.

“When the barrel sections did arrive, the reason they had nothing was because the supplier hadn’t put anything in,” says Sorscher, now a labour representative with Boeing’s engineers union, SPEAA. “They didn’t have a clip or a bracket or a wire or a connector. There was nothing there. Well, that’s why the first airplane spent 15 months in the first position of the assembly line, is because somebody had to figure all that out.”

It took a long time to “figure all that out”. The dream of flying in two months was just that – a dream.

Delays

---

“We get the first delay, which is a six-month delay and an admission that everything isn’t actually all right. It goes on from there and gets worse and worse and worse,” says Dominic Gates of the Seattle Times.

“You have to understand this was unprecedented. There had never been a Boeing delay in a Boeing program. No airplane had ever come out of development late.”

Few in the audience that day could have foreseen what would happen next. There were years of delays, public embarrassment and later the first fleet grounding in Boeing’s history.

For those who witnessed the spectacle, questions remain. How could executives at Boeing rollout this plane to such fanfare? Didn’t they know it couldn’t fly?
‘A complete disconnect’

---

“There were only two conclusions you can draw,” says Aboulafia. “You have executives there who are either lying – in which case they’re clueless because they’re going to get caught in two months – or you have a complete disconnect between the people who were working on the plane, the engineers and the executives who are saying this. And sadly, I think it’s more of the second one. They weren’t lying. They simply didn’t know.”

But not everyone is ready to let Boeing executives, most notably Chief Executive Jim McNerney, plead ignorance. “Well, he’s either a fool or he’s lying, and I don’t think he’s a fool,” says Sanders.

“I don’t care if he’s a liar or an idiot,” says Sorscher. “Either way, he’s not the guy who should be running the company. He should be fired either way. He should be disgraced.”

History may judge the rollout to be a blip, an unfortunate by-product of an overzealous marketing campaign. But if the plane’s troubles continue, that ceremony may come to symbolise something more, something symptomatic of a new Boeing that cares more about marketing the dream than engineering realities.

Some are in little doubt. “It told me how far the company had fallen,” says Sanders. “More than any other single event, it was the big lie and it was a statement that the Boeing company is now all about the big lie.”

---

Al Jazeera put the following questions to Boeing regarding the July 2007 rollout:

Al Jazeera: Any comment on the statement that the airplane used at the 2007 rollout of the Dreamliner was a shell or a fake. Did Boeing executives know at the time that it was just a shell?

Boeing: These questions were publicly addressed by the Company years ago, and we will not add to that record here.

Al Jazeera: You mentioned that questions relating to the 2007 rollout had been publicly addressed by Boeing years ago, but I understand we have been unable to locate any press releases or interviews from Boeing. Would you point us towards whatever was said by Boeing on this subject, and ideally provide a copy of any press release or public statement that was issued at the time in relation to these claims?

Boeing offered links to the following two articles in response:

http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2003845766_787assembly21.html

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/flightblogger/2007/08/boeing_faces_hurdles_opportuni/