Aviation

Vowe got me at my two weak points with linking to this video: aircrafts and good music. I can look at such videos for hours:



PS: Perhaps i should really thinking about learning to fly. I´m asked about that by colleagues, friends and readers in quite a regular manner. But at the moment i´m glad that i´ve lost my fear of flying.

The delays at the 787 program hide a little bit the delays at another important programm of Boeing. The regenerated 747 will be delayed, too 747-8 schedule undone by 787 crisis, management errors . Stephen Trimble writes in his article:

Boeing shifted the delivery date for the 747-8 Freighter to Cargolux from late 2009 to the third quarter of 2010. First delivery of the 747-8 Intercontinental, a passenger variant struggling to attract orders, dropped from late 2010 to the second quarter of 2011.

and

The flight-test phase is now allotted between seven and nine months to complete, Teal says. By comparison, Boeing completed the flight-test programme for the 777-200LR, a perhaps less ambitious derivative programme, in about 10 months in 2005.

At just 20 (+8 for Boeing Business Jet as a customer) orders for the 747-8 but 78 for the freighter i wouldn´t be suprised a lot if see more delays for the passenger variant to help the 747-8F. It´s like in computer engineering ... given a fixed number of engineering cyles you have to find an economical sensible distribution.

The problem with faulty (without anticorrosion plating) nutplates just got bigger. James Wallace writes in "Faulty parts on all Boeing jets":

Those nonconforming nutplates that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago are on all Boeing jets, not just the 737. But there are far fewer on the 747, 777 and 767 than are on the 737. Still, Boeing said Tuesday that they must all be found and replaced before any more planes are delivered.

I assume, those faulty nutplates are in already delivered aircrafts, too.

The flight blogger published an really interesting article, again - 787 Dreamliner production frozen as fastener issue paces program

At first it looks like there is finally a number of fasteners awaiting their substitution.

The Seattle Times, citing sources familiar with the situation, reports that 2000 fasteners will need to be replaced on the aft fuselage and 3000 for the forward fuselage produced by Spirit Aerosystems.

Furthermore they had to disassemble the Dreamline One again. They had to remove more than just the engines:

Dreamliners One through Four have had their engine pylons removed and returned to Spirit AeroSystems for fastener repairs. As a result, the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines from Dreamliner One have been removed and positioned behind the aircraft.

Airbus says Boeing strike was big help:

"PARIS -- Airbus benefited from the recent strike by workers at The Boeing Co. as it gave stretched suppliers more time to focus on orders from the European jet maker, the company said Friday."

I assume the people at Boeing bite their back at the moment. The strike did not only postponed the delivery of all airplanes at Boeing. They even helped their biggest competitor.

I assume the ongoing delays in the 787 Delayliner, 747-8 and 777F programs will help Airbus, too. Some suppliers stopped already the manufacturing for Boeing for some time. More time for them to work for Airbus. At the end many parts of an aircraft (either Boeing or Airbus) are from the same manufacturers. BTW: This is the the same reason, why "Buy american" or "Buy european" is nonsense. Building aircraft got an global business a long time ago ...

Boeing was successful at breaking a part of a 787. Successful means: It broke at more than the oneandahalf-fold ever-expected maximum aerodynamic load. Anyway .... there is a video of the test and looking at engineers breaking huge things with huge tools is really cool ... Dear Boeing ... now do this with a full wing ...

Or to be exact: At least their sense of humor in regard of their airline. The Map application in the Swiss A340-300 is really interesting. They show some POI in their map. I remember at least: Thresher, Titanic, Empress of Ireland and the Wilhelm Gustloff. Those points mark big disasters in maritime history.

Okay, the bad messages from Boeing doesn't end: The flight blogger reports , that Boeing has to replace of nut plates because of non-conformance to specification, as they used ones without an anti-corrosive coating. Mechanics have to remove thousands of plates and place new ones per aircraft.

To add insult to injury, it's likely that several already flying planes have the same non-conforming plates:

According to Boeing, 737s delivered to customers since August 2007 contained non-conforming nutplates. Boeing's delivery website says that 394 737s were delivered between August 2007 and October 2008.

Okay, this starts to get ridiclious. Boeing announced another delay in the 787 program according to this article. The first flight is rescheduled to next year and they didn´t announced a new date. The delivery of the first aircrafts in 2009 look impossible for me.

While everybody expected that the IAM strike would have some impact to the schedule, there is another reason: Wrong installation of fasteners. According to Boeing 3% of all fasteners were incorrectly installed.

An estimated 3 percent of the fasteners on four flight-test planes at the Everett plant, plus two others that have been assembled for ground testing, were installed incorrectly and will have to be removed and replaced.

At a count of several hundred-thousands fasteners per aircraft, 3% is a lot of work. Another article at the Wall Street Journal writes:

Engineers have traced it to improper instructions on what type and length of fasteners to use on certain titanium parts. The fasteners, located throughout the airplane, were installed mostly by suppliers at the plants where the major sections of the jet are being built, and affect all fuselage sections built so far

.I start to get some doubts about entering a 787 when it will entering service in the future.

There is a new requirement from the FAA. Any airplane certified after the 28 November has to have a desginated LRBL. It´s one of this security theater things from my point of view. A LRBL is a "least risk bomb location", a location where a bomb explosion would inflict the least damage to the aircraft. I see some problems in such a location.

You have to move the bomb to get it to the LRBL. At first you have to find someone who is brave enough to move around an live explosive device. As we know of several hollywood movies ( ) an explosive device would have an trap fuse, that would trigger the the explosion in the event of moving it around. You should at least keep the existence secret and hidden in the aircrafts operation manual to prevent the addition of such trap fuses to terrorists bombs or the usage of an more potent explosive substance.

At the end: It´s the classic ammunition/armour competition. There is always one winner and it´s always the same competitor: The ammunition.The only way to increase the airliner explosive survivability is to keep of the explosives offboard.

I had my trip back to Hamburg from Toulouse today. Was a nice flight. Well, except the contact with the ground crew in Toulouse. I had the impertinence to try to board while the boarding of rows 12 to 25 took place. The look from the lady was able to kill mere mortals. She didn´t allowed me to board the plane. Okay ... waiting 30 seconds. She announced the immediate boarding of all rows. Now i was allowed to enter the aircraft. Dammed! French people are really pedantic for a nation with a revolution in its history ...

Hmmm ... die Diskussion, die dieser Tage durch die Medien getrieben wird, kommt mir seltsam bekannt vor: In "Maximal invasive Sicherheit" habe ich 2005 erstmals ueber Backscatter-Röntgen geschrieben. Ich muss mittlerweile sagen, das ich weniger Probleme mit der Technik habe, als damaligerzeit. Mittlerweile sind die Geräte soweit entwickelt, das sie den Körper aus dem Bild herausfiltern und somit nur noch Fremdkörper auf dem Bild zu sehen ist. Also nicht die "Kleine-Jungs"-Phantasie mit der durch Klamotten guckenden Brille. In den Flughaefen in den USA ist es uebrigens ueblich, das die Bilder nicht von den Leute geprueft werden, die auch die Menschen dazu sehen, sondern diese in einem getrennten, entfernten Raum gescreened werden.

An impressive video, that shows the traffic over the european continent. Some of the race tracks above germany are really obvious ... for example the one between Northern Germany and Frankfurt.

Perhaps it´s just me, but i think there must be really big problems in the 787 program, when Boeing celebrates such small steps as a successful static pressure test.