Originally Posted by
underfire
especially how aircraft would fly with concrete blocks hanging form the engine mounts, instead of engines?
They might have to if GE doesn't get it's butt in gear.
The part about pre-stressing the structure during assembly: I'm not certain that they do the wing-body joins with the weights attached. The weights are attached after the landing gear is put on and the plane is set on the factory floor. The wing-body join jig might have some tooling to apply pre loads while tightening the bolts. But moving sections around and working in the jig would be too clumsy with a bunch of blocks to bump into.