B787 First flight? Delivery date?

[sandgate]

OK, so after all the hoo-haa about the delays to the A380 and at last we see it in service after the problems having been ironed out, does anyone have any suggestions as to when the B787 first flight might be. Delivery of the first aircraft has now been publicised as being delayed until the end of neext year - and this is providing no more 'surprises' emerge during flight testing, which have already in themselves been delayed by six months.

While I am not one of the 'mine's better than yours' brigade who scoffed at Airbus' problems, I think that this might be an education to some of our industry's newer recruits in this forum that building a modern-day airliner is a highly complex procedure involving thousands of processes, any of which could go wrong - for Airbus, Boeing or anyone else for that matter.

Any concern I have if at all is the manufacture of the B787 completely out of composite, when I feel that we still have a lot to learn about the long-term characteristics of this material.

Best regards

John

[TurboVolvo]

I am really looking forward to seing this aircraft fly in real life as well.

I believe the first flight date has been pushed back to January of 2008.

[Garrovick]

Is there more than the first A380 in daily operation?

And where are the routes?

The U.S. media seems to have forgotten about the aircraft.

[xxmikexx]

Hi John,

For the benefit of the general readership, here's a link to an interesting article ...

http://www.designnews.com/article/CA6441583.html

The article says that by weight the 787 will be 50% composites, up from about 10% in the 777.

Nobody knew what the long term effects of titanium would be either, yet we've never seen a fatigue failure in the YF-12/SR-71 fleet. The industry has now also had about twenty years experience with mixed composites/metal aircraft in the form of the F-117 and B-2.

An early SR-71 did come apart in flight but this was because the aircraft had tumbled at Mach 2.5 or so owing to a flight controls problem. I said "we've never seen" because, to my knowledge, at least one SR-71 is till being flown by the USA's NASA agency, apparently with no signs of airframe fatigue.

Regular 787 airframe inspections should reveal problems, if any, before catastrophic failure. The Airbus crash of 2001 in NYC wasn't a composites fatigue failure, it was direct overstress of the composite vertical fin beyond the design limits, at the fuselage attachment points, owing to repeated rudder overcontrol in turbulence by the copilot. In turn that problem was due to the fact that, until a revision of the flight control software, the sensitivity of rudder inputs INCREASED with increasing airspeed rather than decreasing as with essentially all other aircraft types.