Redesign comes in due to the excessive weight reduction exercise conducted on the wing box.
One can ask, in light of the test results for the fuselage (withstand 200% of the limit load - requirement is 150% i.e. the ultimate load, not to go into regulatory lingo for this) one can assume initial design beefed up the fuse (Boeing was not initially sure how the concept will work due to the tooling (mandrel) issues etc).
So, one needs to find a place to do the weight reduction and consequently one hits the wing box. Execution was expected form a bunch of eager, young, stress engineers running Excel spreadsheets and "proving" everything is fine. Now, the correction comes in.
Still, this is not a big problem. Let us all seat and wait for the flight tests to start rolling to see that everything is working fine.
THEN we can start commenting. Up to that point all is "bolloks". So far manufacturing issues are a no-stopper.
One thing we, the engineering community, forget is the fact that lazy B is not obliged to pay the smaller guys (Tiers 2 and down) until the flight tests are completed. They start being short on cash (for obvious reasons!) and they desperately need money to run the operation. However due to unforeseen reasons, not related to this project (crap in financial industry) banks hold short on them not letting them borrow that easily. Therefore the small guy is late so everybody's late.
Please use this in your equation.
Cheers
Cheers
Last edited by Grunf; 23rd Mar 2008 at 19:11.