Boeing's radical new aircraft ' The 787'

[afterdark]

i dont much get into Airbus versus Boeing things really but with the new pictures of the 787 compared to the first pictures when they released the design, my first thoughts were of dismay

the wings apart
the front seemed to look like a facelifted slightly sleeker A321 and the larger version in the Air Canada picture looked a lot like a cross between a B767 and an A330 is it just me ?

[PAXboy]

I think that we may be in a similar postion to the motor industry 15 years ago. Both companies A + B are chasing the same airlines for the same specification. They both use 'the latest' design technology and computerised testing equipment etcetera, etcetera.

At one point, the cars from several different design houses, all looked the same - until the companies realised that they had narrowed into the same gap and found new ways to differentiate. With their being only two large sized commercial a/c makers, it was inevitable that they would do the same and, naturally more difficult for them to find their way out of the chicane again.

[747FOCAL]

What were you guys expecting? a souped up concorde cross with a 777? :confused:

[MarkD]

afterdark

the 777 has been around a while so that shouldn't have been surprising. However the 787 sharktail being missing makes you wonder whether it was ever really more than a marketing tactic?

FOCAL

I suppose the guy was expecting a "revolutionary" plane to look, well, revolutionary. However, the lack of revolution is unsurprising when the aircraft it is most frequently compared to as revolutionary is the venerable 767.

[A-FLOOR]

747FOCAL: To be honest I really liked the 787 we all know with that sleek, sexy nose...

I concur with afterdark. My first thoughts when I saw the 787 design freeze were also of dismay and I am very much disappointed they did away with much of the revolutionary exterior design.

Granted, the sharktail was a marketing fad, but what they did now is just shamelessly copy what Airbus has been doing for years, albeit for all three tail airfoils instead of just the horizontal tail. :hmm:

Now it looks so castrated it's almost like an overgrown ERJ-170 :\

[oceancrosser]

It´s been known for quite a while that the 787 would not look like the artistic marketing images which basically served the purpose of differentiation and to stir interest.
The curved shapes would have been difficult to build and in windtunnel tests proved to be an "aerodynamical disaster", a qoute I saw somewhere from Boeing.
And of course, whether Boeing or Airbus or anything else, they all fly through the same air and are at the end of the day subject to the same laws of physics and aerodynamics!

[BEagle]

To be honest, there's not really very much more any designer can do with the basic 2-jet, swept wing airliner shape apart from a few minor signature flourishes....

But the 'frozen' 7E7 design has almost as little in common with the earlier images than it has with the stillborn Sonicruiser.......

[oncemorealoft]

Well I was somewhat relieved having seen the frozen design. The previous marketing pictures might have been the artist's view of what a modern airliner should look like but to me it just didn't look quite right -particularly the ghastly shark tail.

Now it looks right - not pretty, but purposeful.

There's still some scope for asthetics in the large twin - to my mind the B777-200 looks a lot more pleasing to the eye than the A330 and the A319 looks better than the B737 (always was a funnly little ugly fat f****r - but lovely with it!).

Not sure about the A380 - the planned stretches look better than the initial version. Looked good taking to the air today though - and I'd never noticed the interesting wing profile when seen from head on.