Another 6-month delay of 787 jet reported

When Boeing releases the revised delivery schedule for its 787 Dreamliner later this month, the timetable is likely to be shoved out at least another six months.

That's the consensus of industry analysts, as well as unnamed people cited in a Wall Street Journal story online Thursday — a schedule that would put the first Dreamliner delivery to All Nippon Airways in mid-2010, fully two years later than originally planned.

The Dreamliner's first flight is "just not going to happen" before next summer, and flight tests are likely to last a year after that, said Scott Hamilton, an aviation analyst who runs the Leeham.net Web site.

Boeing spokeswoman Yvonne Leach said the company is "still reviewing" the 787 schedule and has not completed its assessment.

Separately, an internal Airbus report on the beleaguered Boeing jet program, published Wednesday on a blog operated by trade magazine Flight International, suggests the new plane is overweight and won't fly as far as advertised.

Boeing executives have been visiting suppliers and major partners around the world over the last weeks, assessing how much time they will need to add to the Dreamliner schedule.

The Machinist strike can be blamed for perhaps three months of any new 787 delay. Though the work stoppage lasted only two months and ended at the beginning of November, Boeing has struggled in the subsequent month to get the assembly lines moving again — even for its established aircraft programs.

The plane maker delivered only four jets in all of November, all of which had been more or less completed before the strike. The month before the strike, Boeing had delivered 36 jets.

But the Dreamliner program has myriad other problems that are stretching out the Dreamliner schedule.

Last month, Boeing acknowledged that it will have to replace up to 8,000 of the fasteners on each of the first dozen planes that are in various stages of completion. The fasteners were installed incorrectly, both in Everett and at the factories of Boeing's 787 partners, largely due to poorly written planning documents.

Hamilton said he's heard from people inside Boeing that the plane's complex systems software is also causing delay.

This view mirrors that of a senior Boeing engineer, who spoke about the program during the strike on condition of anonymity.

The engineer said the software systems are not defective, but that integrating all of the software from different sources is taking much longer than expected.

Hamilton said the Dreamliner's first flight is "just not going to happen" before next summer and he expects flight tests to last a year — which puts first delivery in mid-2010. In a blog Tuesday, Hamilton summarized a series of Wall Street analysts' comments concurring on roughly that time frame.

In an online report Thursday, The Wall Street Journal cited people familiar with the discussion over the new 787 schedule forecasting also a mid-2010 first delivery.

The only silver lining for Boeing, Hamilton said, is that the collapse of the economy and the credit squeeze "removes the urgency to get the airplane in service."

Passenger traffic is way down, so airlines have cut capacity and reduced their need for airplanes. The price of jet fuel has fallen dramatically, lessening the clamor for the super-efficient Dreamliner. And financing is tight, so airlines will find it difficult to pay for the jets already ordered.

Boeing spokeswoman Leach declined to comment on the leaked Airbus document, a scathing "competitive intelligence" assessment of Boeing's program that was published at the Flightblogger Web site.

Airbus spokeswoman Mary Anne Greczyn also declined to comment on the company's assessment of its rival's jet.

"Airbus is not commenting on the document, as it is internal to Airbus," Greczyn said.

The 46-page PowerPoint document — titled "Boeing 787, Lessons Learnt" — was presented internally Oct. 20 by Burkhard Domke, Airbus Head of Engineering Intelligence.

The report provides detail about design and production issues gleaned from suppliers, airline customers and also from Boeing internal documents.

A lot of it is well known, such as the supply-chain problems at sites such as Charleston, S.C., where Boeing partner Vought hired "low-wage trained-on-the-job workers that had no previous aerospace experience," the report says.

But the Airbus assessment includes additional detail, concluding that significant engineering changes were needed because Boeing's "oversight (was) not adequate for the high level of outsourcing in detailed design."

"Vought had no engineering department when selected" as a 787 major partner, the assessment states.

The Airbus report claims that Boeing's Japanese partner Mitsubishi is wrangling over money before committing the investment needed to ramp up production beyond 7 planes per month.

And the assessment shows that its staff members think the first version of the 787, the 787-8, will be some 7 tons heavier than currently forecast by Boeing. That's almost 4 percent heavier.

Perhaps more importantly, the range of the Dreamliner is set at about 6,900 nautical miles, rather than the 7,600 to 8,000 now cited by Boeing.

Hamilton said such a shortfall would hit hard at airlines such as Qantas that want to use the Dreamliner to fly long routes.

The Airbus dossier includes photocopies of Boeing internal documents that are marked "Boeing Proprietary."

However, these slides seem to be of the type made available to airlines who are prospective customers and do not include very secret material.

It's unclear how Airbus obtained the detailed data on weight and range on some other slides.

One page in the Airbus report also claims that Boeing put passenger windows too close to the joins between major fuselage sections and that subsequently it had to remove the windows at those points to preserve the plane's structural integrity.

Illustrations of the 787 at the Boeing Web site indeed show gaps in the window rows at the two points on the fuselage with major joins — so that a passenger might have to sit without a window.

The Airbus report suggests passengers might have to sit in that spot, without a window, and notes with glee: "Affected passengers may not be happy."

One aviation expert said it's not unusual to remove windows as an airplane's design evolves.

And it's possible airlines may use that space for other purposes — All Nippon Airways, for instance, needs a location on the 787 for its new in-flight bidet lavatories.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com