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BTW, I read somewhere that the delay in the 787's first flight is due to a problem with where the wing joins the body. Can anyone elaborate on this? It sounds like a pretty major issue.

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Will Boeing delay the 787 Dreamliner another two years?

My recent post about Boeing's (BA) leak that it had shut down Alenia, one of its suppliers in Naples, Italy, encouraged several people close to the company to contact me. One of these people, who requested to remain anonymous, told me he spent two years working as a consultant with the 787 program across several of Boeing's systems and manufacturing organizations.

While I have only exchanged emails with him and spoken to him once, his concerns about the 787 program seem plausible. And he estimates that the 787's problems could take at least another two years to solve.

How so? My source told me that there are significant problems with a number of systems for the 787 -- news of which has so far not reached the public. The delays to date have been blamed on a variety of ills -- including suppliers not meeting deadlines, an insufficient number of fasteners, a machinist strike, problems with the 787's wing assembly -- which is causing problems where the wing attaches to the fuselage and most recently, fuselage skin wrinkling.

But I was stunned by his claim that several of the systems -- which are being made by Hamilton Sundstrand (HS) -- a United Technologies (UTX) subsidiary -- are not working. He identified the the 787's Environmental Control System (ECS), which is intended to pressurize the aircraft, as a particular problem. He says he believes there is not a technological solution to the problem.

When I asked Boeing for comment, a spokesperson said, "The 787's systems are working, including the environmental control system that pressurizes the airplane. We are continuing to improve and mature the systems, as is normal for a development program." A Hamilton Sundstrand spokesperson told me that he had no knowledge of such problems.

However, my source told me he spoke just yesterday with an engineer employed by a current Boeing partner who confirmed that this problem has not been solved. In addition to the ECS problems, he says that the 787's electrical system has not lived up to expectations and several redesigns are necessary before the aircraft enters into service.
I don't know what my source's motivations would be for providing this information, but given all the delays and leaks, I thought it worth reporting.

There is a deeper problem with the 787 and that has to do with Boeing's management style. As I wrote in my book, Boeing has a long history of command-and-control leadership -- where top executives tell everyone else what to do. Under its new CEO, Jim McNerney, Boeing had adopted a so-called Transformational Leadership (TL) approach which empowered workers to make decisions, have ownership, and to take responsibility for success and/or failure.

TL was behind Boeing's radical decision to outsource 60 percent of the 787 design and manufacturing to its suppliers. In the past, Boeing had given its suppliers very detailed specifications. But with the 787, Boeing let the suppliers do the design and manufacturing. The first manager of the 787, Mike Bair, was a transformational leader.

Bair took the blame for the 787's delays and Boeing replaced Bair with Pat Shanahan from Boeing's defense unit. As such, Boeing reverted back to its old command-and-control style of leadership. My source claims that when Boeing spent three days in the spring of 2008 with HS, the supplier of the 787's electrical systems, Boeing issued orders to its supplier about how it wanted HS to fix the problems.

Rather than listen to what HS thought would work, Shanahan's team issued orders. And according to my source, HS agreed to what Shanahan wanted even though it did not believed that his ideas or time-line would work.

This story, if true, is deeply troubling because it suggests that Boeing could be panicking and reverting back to its old style of working -- but this time without sufficient technical know-how to make the right decisions. If Boeing is suffering from this deeper management problem, delivering the 850 787 Dreamliners that the airlines have ordered is going to be an even bigger nightmare than I had previously thought.
Peter Cohan is a management consultant, Babson professor and author of eight books including, You Can't Order Change. Follow him on *******. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned.

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Is the Boeing 787's electrical system working?

After my post yesterday, which quoted an unnamed source who estimates that fixing the Boeing 787's problems could take two years, another insider approached me with details of problems with the 787's electrical system (ES). This source, also anonymous, says he worked as a software engineer at Boeing for a decade and is close to the 787 program. This source claims that the 787's ES failed Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspection last year so the FAA ordered the firm responsible for the ES's software to rewrite the code. In my reporting yesterday on potential delays, Boeing spokespeople denied knowledge of any serious problems with the 787's systems.
As claims of problems increase, in my mind, this raises some serious questions about Boeing's board.


A company's board of directors is supposed to keep an eye on the store on behalf of the shareholders. But the ongoing delays of Boeing's (BA) 787 are raising questions about whether its board is fulfilling its obligations. After all, one of the most basic jobs of a public company is to disclose market-moving information to the public on a timely basis. And shareholders are beginning to wonder whether Boeing is holding back such information.
This suggests that Boeing's board does not know about the problems with the 787 or if it does, it has decided that the details of these problems do not need to be released to shareholders. But the 787 is a huge program -- it has 850 orders amounting to a $154 billion backlog. Therefore, a delay in its delivery schedule can cost Boeing billions in late fees, delayed revenues, and potentially canceled orders.
First here's some background to explain why the ES is so important for the 787. The ES is critical to aircraft operation -- it distributes power around the aircraft from the engines and the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) -- which provides the power to operate the air conditioning and to start the engines at the gate -- to all the systems requiring electricity.
My source told me that the ES is a so-called level A system (highest level of certification) -- which must pass stringent testing. Such certification Includes evidence of following processes in development and passing thousands of tests. Almost everything on the aircraft is electrical -- even the brakes -- so "it is very critical the system works flawlessly."
This source told me that the software that controls the ES was developed by HCL Technologies -- a $2 billion (2008 revenues) Indian software company that works with Boeing and its partners on the 787 and won Boeing's Gold Performance Excellence Award this February. He spoke with colleagues at United Technologies (UTX) division -- Hamilton Sundstrand (HS) -- which is the ES's primary contractor.
His ES colleagues told him that the Designated Engineering Representative (DER) -- a SWAT team of top engineers that tests aircraft software against rigorous standards -- and the FAA refused to certify the work HCL did and told HS to start over -- without HCL. Several of my source's colleagues joined HS at the end of 2008 in an effort to rewrite the software.
My source says the HCL was chosen for the software in response to Boeing's order that its suppliers outsource at least 25 percent of the work to overseas sub-contractors. And if this information about HCL is true, perhaps HS did not do the best job of picking a qualified supplier. But now that HS is re-doing the software itself, my source can't estimate when it will complete the job to the FAA's satisfaction.
I am surprised that Boeing has not disclosed this problem because it would seem difficult to fly the 787 without a functioning ES. The failure to disclose this suggests that Boeing's board was not aware of the problem or it decided that it was not in the board's interest to disclose it.
I think the SEC may need to look into whether Boeing's board is fulfilling its obligations to shareholders.
Peter Cohan is a management consultant, Babson professor and author of eight books including, You Can't Order Change. Follow him on *******. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned.

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The damage that spin and uncritical reporting did to the 787 Dreamliner, Boeing, and the airlines

September 10, 2009 – 3:23 pm, by Ben Sandilands
You don’t have to be interested in aircraft or flying to find a parable about corporate fantasies, outright lies, or the image spinning that can harm or destroy businesses by looking at the dismal saga of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. As mentioned in the preceding post, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries overnight publicly blindsided Boeing by dropping the use of composites in much of its MRJ project.

No doubt, Boeing will lean hard on 787 partner Mitsubishi to recant, modify, or explain away the obvious, but to what end? The Dreamliner is flirting with failure, or suspension, and has already set records for deceptive public announcements, broken promises and weasel words.

The damage done by the Dreamliner fantasy spinners that suppressed the contrary voices among this once great company’s engineers and designers reaches into Airbus, which fell for the rhetoric and committed to a largely plastic competitor, the A350, and into carriers like Qantas, which still has 50 of the 787s on order and has been left looking reckless in its unquestioning acceptance of the Boeing pitch .

Qantas officially maintains it will get its first 787s in the middle of 2013, and not just the one that Boeing can’t even get into the air, but its successor, the 787-9. Even Air New Zealand, which is the launch customer for that version, has known for some time it won’t get a –9 until 2014.

And now Mitsubishi, who made the wing section that broke unexpectedly in a stress test in May, has dropped the plastics from all the critical or ‘adventurous’ parts of its own MRJ regional jet project.

This 787 con, which featured the roll out of a shell of a jet in July 2007, and was the subject of so many seriously deficient claims by Boeing, was sucked up to by a compliant media that has only just started to ask the hard questions.

What exactly did Boeing expect to get from tame reporting? It didn’t help the project, and probably delayed to some extent the onset of reality.

Neither Qantas nor any other customer on public record, is shown to have commissioned expert independent analysis of the claims for high composite structural usage such as proposed for the 787.
Instead the college kids who look like they should have been Mormon missionaries, stomped the world talking up the 787 as a ‘game changer.’

These are the two most dishonest words in aviation language. The only game changed by the 787 has been that of getting away with fantasy claims for a 767 replacement that on all the real indications will be larger, heavier, more expensive to maintain, and with shorter range.

Boeing is a company where hype has suppressed reality right up to the last possible moment. And not been challenged in general by the mainstream media, until now.

Scott Carson, who was relieved of his ‘leadership’ role at the 787, was replaced as president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes by James Albaugh, whose previous achievements include the failure of the Connexion by Boeing sky internet product, and the failure to get a fully functioning Wedgetail airborne command and early warning aircraft ready for delivery to the RAAF at anything remotely resembling the original specifications or timetable.

Boeing is a case study of how rhetoric, spinning, and media cultivation can critically weaken if not destroy an enterprise.

Can it now provide a similar case study in how to repair itself? That depends on its customers, who had ordered over 900 Dreamliners, and are battling the GFC, as well as its own ability to make the 787 work.

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It looks better than the Dugong

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The Dugong was delayed far less that the 787, and it actually didnt have design problems, it was a wiring problem, but there was never anything wrong with it structurally

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