787 DreamLiner
 

as the date of release is nearing is it going to be as boeing predicts is going to be and will it be vunrable to lightning stricks as it is the world first totaly composit aircraft:confused:

Sorry, but I can't let this one pass...

One hopes its on-board computers will have the spell-checker locked in the 'ON' position.

hare hair two that!

The guy's using English as a foreign language- how would your questions look in Arabic chaps? Good on him- he made his meaning known, and deserves a sensible answer. What bugs me are the English people here who have completed umpteen years of education (that I paid for) and still can't differentiate between there, their or they're. Now that's an offence!

So q80airbus- these composites are carbon fibre. Carbon fibre has been in service for years, mainly in flight controls. It's qualities are well known in lightning strikes. This aeroplane will have more than any other civil transport. The FAA would only certificate this aeroplane if it was completely confident that it was safe and the damage and lightning repair damage qualities were well known. As pointed out, military aeroplanes are ahead of civil in this area, so it is not an unknown quality. Also, people have full trust in Boeing knowing what they're doing- they did after all produce that work of art, the B747!

787/ Dreamliner
 

Heard a murmer today that FCA have pulled their option for the new aircraft and that possibly MON/ZB have taken it. This will mean that they will be one of the first to fly it.....

Can anyone confirm?????

Not surprising post-merger of the fleets following the merger announcement, as they would otherwise require rationalisation of numbers.

FCA isn't an 'option' as such. They have firm contracts for the 787, as a launch customer, and also with GE for the GEnx.

Monarch have specified the Trent 1000 on theirs. The two would be incompatible. As TUI are currently doing a fleet renewal exercise, which will include the Thomsonfly (and therefore First Choice) operation I would think it is completely unfounded for several good reasons.

Rumour has it that Mon has already sold its options on the Dreamliner and has been offered a very good deal on the 350...:ok:

Needless to say the Boeing boys at Mon are very unhappy

Afraid it doesn't work like that. The options are options to purchase that must either be exercised (converted into firm orders for that customer), or they lapse by an agreed date. The customer has no ownership and cannot sell this type of option to purchase.

So all a lot of hot air. Both FCA and Monarch have firm orders for the 787 and both have additional options to purchase as set down in their respective purchase contracts.

Scarebus 321 keep dreaming ( about the dreamliner ) the 350 isn't coming anytime soon, and the Boeing options cannot be sold. Don't you have a Malaga or a Faro you should be doing ? :)

The reason Monarch did not go with the A350 was the version Monarch was looking at was going to be the second version to be launched, so 2014 was the earliest it would be available, if then.
If you look TUI have already ordered the B787, so maybe the FCA ones are due about the same time as TUIs so are surplus to requirements, but it could all be just a "RUMOUR".:ok:

Interesting discussion.... I would have thought that so far as orders by FCA, TOM or TUI are concerned they are being treated as separate discrete entities for now.

Also there has been no discussion of a fleet contraction. In fact I believe TUI travel was quoted in the last press release on the merger saying it will have 23 787. By my calculations that would include the current lauch options FCA have and the "undisclosed" order that TUI AG placed for the 787 sometime this or last year.

As the press release would indicate one would expect the FCA order to eventually come within the scope of the new TUI Travel PLC order. But I fear that seeing as Tflys own MD didn't know about the merger before the announcement I can't imagine that Tui Airline Management will have consolidated any aircraft orders just yet!!

Plus the takeover of LTU by Air Berlin now presents a quandry for the German market. Currently the TUI Long haul is provided mainly by LTU in Germany but I doubt this will continue for much longer.....watch this space.

It is not the issue of carbon-fibre but to be certified, it must demonstrate the ability to take strikes without negative effects. Lightning is considered part of the operating environment, like ice, and thus for the airplane to achieve FAA and JAA cert, it must pass lightning certification.

WIth carbon fibre airplanes, often manufacturers will embed mesh into the structure to help keep the lightning on the surface and to bleed it away from the more critical components. Also, things like computers and such are put in hardened sites to protect and shield them from strikes.

Interesting is to learn there are Negative Strikes and a Positive Strike, not that you have any choice. But the Positive Strike (singular) is estimated to be about 10 times more powerful than the negative strikes (plural)

When you land, if you have pitted surfaces, it was negative. If you have parts missing, it may have been a positive.

Ummm...wrong and wronger.
Both of these examples are constructed from conventional materials under the skin (aluminium, steel & titanium etc), and have carbon fibre and other composite panels and structures attached (e.g canards, intakes, nose cones, wing panels, leading edges, moving surfaces etc).

The B-2 also has a composite-laced paint sprayed over it (you should smell the solvents in the curing hangar...PHEW!)

Cheers

Magoo

Incorrect, options can be traded.

First 787 Shots!!
 

The first shots of the 787, she's finally complete!!

http://www.airliners.net/discussions....main/3478111/

Regards,

JetsetJ

Nose-section remind me of the Nimrod.

Yet another bloated twin in the series that started with the 767. The age of designing beautiful commercial aircraft must be over.

Looks like an inflated 757.

Nothing special and nothing like the artist impressions that were doing the rounds.

Looks very much like a 767

PAXboy, IB4138,
Thanks guys, exactly my reaction.
After all the "oh, how beautiful" raves on airliners.net, I thought it must be me.

Yaaaawn, another lookylikey:bored:

Perhaps it's gonna look better when streched... But those raked wingtips kick butt!
http://www.ostrower.com/jon/assembly...bair_pas-6.jpg

LOL.... first time I see a picture of them.
So winglets are out, Batman is in.

The empennage looks a bit naff. Why have they abandoned the blade tail cone of the B777 and gone back to the pointy tail cone of the B767?

I must say, I do like large engines on an aircraft ... bit like large breasts on a woman.:oh:

Jeez, I hope Boeings designers are better at drawing than their artists! That looks nowt like the 'artists impressions' on the PR bumpf.
Nose cone off a Comet, body off a B767 and engines off a B777. Welcome to the B787 mongrel! :rolleyes:

787 - A350 -787 - A350 you pays your money and takes your choice. Both look pretty similar to me. Can't be long before we have in-flight refuelling for airliners so you can go all the way with a 787. That would be fun!

Don't you feel sorry for the spotters, these days?
All those little twins look the same.
All those big twins look the same.

At least the four-engine ones are still OK: if it's fat, it's a 747, if it looks like a 747 on a diet, it's a 340.

Ah, the days when it was either a Meteor or a Hunter.....

The artist drawings that they circulated a year or two ago were VERY clever. The swooping lines made it look like a dolphin - but when you looked at the image stripped of all it's fancy lines ... guess what? It's Mummy was a 767 and it's Dad a 777. :}

Unfortunately, we are now in the era that the motor car manufacturers reached about a dozen years ago. That is to say that, the end user specified everything and the computers designed it and ... guess what? They all looked the same. :}

Still looks better than an A380 to me! :O

yes, it does look like the 767, but what were you expecting? For a lot of airlines, it is what is going to be replacing 767s, because it has similar capacity/range etc...
And yes, it does look better than the A380!!! :ok:

I agree, she looks heavy and sluggish, nothing like the artist impression.

smelly Hangar?
 

Yes, phenolics and epoxies can be quite smelly. Especially if copious amounts of free amine based hardners are used... It would not be good to use a solvent for anything but tool cleaning as solvents in resin would greatly reduce mechanical properties of the composite.

If it::)

Flies like a 763
Has performance of a 762 with the C2 engines
Attracts the same salary

and If it doesn't::{

Land like a 762
Get painted either powder blue or bright yellow (with or without technicolour bird turd on the tail)

It will do me. What it looks like is a bit secondary. Now, about my wife............:E

Hurkemmer,

So does that mean that it would be detrimental to the airframe to strip paint using solvents?

Should metal scrapers be used instead... ?? :hmm:

After all the hype this is very ho-hum. While the A380 may not appeal to some people's visual tastes at least it was a new and exciting venture. This 787 is same old, same old, and it doesn't exactly do anything in the beauty stakes either.

The A380 looks fat and "overweight" like a guppy compared to the A340. BUT with an extended body length - now that would be fascinating. How long before this arrives ?

EGBM,

On that basis, the last real ground-breaker was the 367-80. Everything else since then (including the 747 and A380) has been evolutionary.

All long tubes, swept wings low on the fuse, with engines in pods.

Double-deck aircraft? Old hat. Been done before, sixty years ago.

The Dreamliner (if one is to believe the press) is a leap due to the technology employed in its innards, its engines and in the construction of the airframe (ie. mostly composites).

How that last point will go in 15-20 years when they go to scrap the things will be interesting - how do you melt down carbon fibre?!

Taildragger, point taken, but to a recent generation whose last breath of excitement was Concorde the A380 offers something *slightly* different to the monoculture of single-deck bloaty multi-aisled twins, of which the 787 is ultimately just another example. As mentioned earlier by another poster, this may be how it's going to be, all things considered, and I can understand the practicalities of why this is the case.

EGBM,

Actually you mention one which I forgot - Concorde :{. That was a real change. I shall go and do several rounds of :ugh: at my foolish oversight and beg forgiveness from the PPRuNe community for doing so.

But yes I think you are right - the old tube-with-wings has been pretty much 'it' since they figured out how to carry more than two punters, a couple of pigs and a mailbag.

Boeing tried to break the mold just a bit with the Sonic Cruiser... bit it didn't 'fly', literally or figuratively. They did say, when launching the 787, that a lot of the work they did on the Sonic Cruiser - aerodynamics, composites - then got put into the 787 but the main difference is that, not going up into the transonic area, the operating economics are going to be much more reliable.

Taildragger,
You're pretty well right, even if we have been moving the pods around a bit over the years.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3.../12060002w.jpg
And a lot of the smaller stuff (RJ, BJ) still do it "à la Caravelle".
But you shouldn't have forgotten Concorde, even if it was a one-off (not counting the Tu-144). :ugh: