Originally Posted by
er340790
I'm not sure if that particular airframe has any special issues, but given that Boeing's P.R. blurb these days that airframe life is practically limitless (with proper maintenance), does 24 years and 51+k hours seem a little 'light'?
Reportedly when WA001 was built, they didn't assemble the wing properly - some wing spars were installed backwards (remember, this was the very first 777 wing built). According to the report at the time, it didn't affect the ultimate limit loads of the wing, but it did affect the load distribution and hence the fatigue life. At the time it was assumed this meant Boeing would never sell WA001 and would just hang on to it for flying test bed use.
I'd left the 777 by the time they sold WA001 to Cathay, but I assume they did enough analysis to determine it could be used for commercial service with appropriate fatigue life restrictions.
Airbubba, the original 767 was more comparable to the A310 than the A300 - the 767 and A310 used pretty much the same engines (the later re-engine of the 767 went up against the A300-600).
ETOPS wise, the 777 was the first aircraft designed from the ground up for ETOPS, and was the first aircraft to have ETOPS "out of the box" (i.e. at entry into service). To get ETOPS out of the box, we pretty much had to make it up as we went since it had never done been before. A lot of the things implemented for early ETOPS on the 777 are now SOP for new twin engine aircraft (or significantly modified - think NEO or MAX).