News More Dreamliner woes

[garyw]

Following on from the Heathrow Dreamliner fire and a few other issues these two stories appeared close to each other.

OSLO (Reuters) - Norwegian Air has called in Boeing management for a meeting in Oslo this week following a slew of technical problems with its two Dreamliner planes, the low-cost carrier said on Monday.
"We are going to tell them this situation is far from good enough," company spokeswoman Anne-Sissel Skaanvik told Reuters. "We have not had the reliability that we had expected from brand new planes, so something must happen, fast ... Clearly Boeing has not had good enough operative quality control."
Norwegian has three more Dreamliners on order and it intends to lease three more to expand its transatlantic service. The eight-plane fleet is worth about $1.65 billion at list prices

source: http://wkzo.com/news/articles/2013/...-in-boeing-for-meeting-after-dreamliner-woes/

and

Boeing’s high-tech Dreamliner faced new challenges on Sunday as a 787 operated by LOT Polish Airlines en route from Toronto, Canada to Warsaw, Poland was forced to land in Iceland on Sunday after its onboard identification system began to malfunction and Norway refused it entry into its airspace.
On Saturday, Norwegian Air Shuttle said it was parking one of its two 787s and demanding that Boeing fix the aircraft. The plane was grounded in Bangkok on Friday after technical difficulties. Norwegian is the first operator of the 787 to have Boeing provide maintenance services for the plane.
“We’re not at all satisfied with the performance of the aircraft,” said Lasse Sandaker-Nielsen, a spokesman for the airline. Boeing said it is “working [with Norwegian]…to ensure we have the right support in place to help each airline through the entry-into-service process.”
Earlier this month, LOT had to temporarily ground two of its five Dreamliners after discovering missing fuel filters in both jets. This resulted in numerous flight cancellations and delays. The airline said that it is seeking reimbursement from Boeing for all related costs including at least $30 million from the global grounding of all 787 jets in January.
LOT sent two aircraft to pick up passengers who were stranded in Iceland, the airline said. It will also have the aircraft repaired there before flying it back to Warsaw.

 

[thepenguin]

sigh.

 

[Yoda]

Very poor track record so far. Extremely dissapointing

 

[Urwumpe]

Its a banana aircraft - ripes at the customer.

 

[Notebook]

It may be experiencing something similar to this:

In Context
The Comet was the world's first passenger jet airliner, designed and built in Britain.
It revolutionised air travel, and was the pride of the British aviation industry for its first year, until the first of three catastrophic crashes happened in March 1953.

After the conclusive evidence revealed in the inquiry that metal fatigue concentrated at the corners of the aircraft's windows had caused the crashes, all aircraft were redesigned with rounded windows.

It took four years for de Havilland to get the redesigned Comet re-certified for commercial service.

In the meantime, the American aircraft manufacturer, Boeing, had released its 707 passenger jet, which could carry almost twice as many passengers.

The new American airliner soon cornered the market, and only 90 of the re-designed Comet 4 series were sold.

Most were removed from service by the early 1980s, and Britain's early and commanding lead in the commercial aviation industry dwindled to nothing.

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet"]De Havilland Comet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

Not a good comparson? The Dreamliner has had no fatalaties.


N.

 

[Keatah]

I feel the forces of overall short-term thinking and cost-cutting, prevalent throughout American businesses more so than anywhere else, is at the very root of the 787's problems.

I don't doubt that each glitch and fail will be blamed on a specific & provable piece of technology to great fanfare. And while I doubt this will put Boeing out of business, it will cast a negative spell over the 787 line. And Boeing will need to learn from their mis-steps.

Get the product in the field, and debug it there. It's always been this way, but you don't want to do it too much. I find it disturbing that much of our software is made this way also. Any software.

 

[MattBaker]

Well, Airbus stated that their new A350 (first flight was in June I think) is even more efficient than the Dreamliner.
I wonder if they could use this whole situation to their advantage and grab a bigger share of the market. Especially the American market.:hmm:

 

[Keatah]

They'd be fools not to take advantage of Dreamliner's fail..

Airbus just needs to take things slow and methodically, spend that extra man-hour making sure all the wire ties are done just right.

 

[boogabooga]

It's a little premature to call the Dreamliner a fail...

I seem to remember a few years ago that the A380 went through some teething trouble of its own, including problems with the wiring for the entertainment system, and... oh yeah, a thrown turbine blade.

It's interesting to see what is causing problems on this "high tech" aircraft. Is it the composite material? No. Is it the Next Generation Engines? No. The flight control system, the advanced wing design, the innovative chevron sound suppression? No, No and No. It isn't the "aerospace" parts at all. It's rather the mundane stuff provided by contractors- batteries, beacons, fuel pumps- the kind of stuff that has been around for decades.

I would be much more concerned if, for example, cracks were found in the composite material.

 

[Keatah]

Absolutely right. It's the common parts, stuff been around for years. Just the sign of the times: Less quality, more quantity, more profit, faster & faster.

Or a big conspiracy, one other big company paid off these smaller companies to deliver lesser quality stuff. It happens in "smaller" industries.:shifty:

 

[Urwumpe]

It's rather the mundane stuff provided by contractors- batteries, beacons, fuel pumps- the kind of stuff that has been around for decades.

All important stuff is done by contractors. Boeing only assembles the sections in the end. Also in aircraft, you have no mundane stuff - even the carpet is not mundane at all.

I think the Dreamliner problems are far from normal. They are caused by design decisions that had not been properly tested. There are many small problems.

Not always large ones, but it shows a trend in the quality management there. Details have not been properly tested at all and result in big problems in flight. Problems that should have been caught before production start, had been shipped to customers.

Just compare this with the A380 problems: Just two. One caused by a slow oil leak in the engine, that only develops under actual flight conditions, in a engine, that is only used in the A380 currently. The other caused by too weak fittings in the wings, resulting in early cracks in flight operations - is fixed now by Airbus by replacing the fittings and will be ultimatively fixed by a different aluminum alloy in the wings from 2014 on.

These are problems that you can't test on the ground or in a limited test campaign. Also, they are not new kinds of problems for a new aircraft.

 

[boogabooga]

I mean mundane- for an airliner, but I did not say unimportant. Not the kind of "high tech" advancements that for example Boeing would put in its advertisement literature- like compose materials etc.

Also, apologizing for stress cracks in brand new aircraft and also about the worst mechanical failure possible on a propulsion system as "not new" and developing only under "flight conditions" while condemning Boeing as guilty of poor testing and quality control seems, in my view, a rather biased assessment.

Well, Airbus stated that their new A350 (first flight was in June I think) is even more efficient than the Dreamliner.
I wonder if they could use this whole situation to their advantage and grab a bigger share of the market. Especially the American market.:hmm:

The "American market" doesn't really include that many jumbos to begin with, except of course the leasing companies. In terms of airlines, the are no A380s for example, and as many 787s in the "Japanese market". Not sure why the "American market" needs to be singled out.

 

[MattBaker]

The "American market" doesn't really include that many jumbos to begin with, except of course the leasing companies. In terms of airlines, the are no A380s for example, and as many 787s in the "Japanese market". Not sure why the "American market" needs to be singled out.

I rather meant that American airline companies often prefer Boeing over Airbus. But with the trouble that the Dreamliner seems to have and since airlines are surely concerned with passenger safety this might shift.

 

[Urwumpe]

Also, apologizing for stress cracks in brand new aircraft and also about the worst mechanical failure possible on a propulsion system as "not new" and developing only under "flight conditions" while condemning Boeing as guilty of poor testing and quality control seems, in my view, a rather biased assessment.

Not biased - I just see it like a tester: Errors that can only be noticed in actual operations may happen in actual operations - its sadly unavoidable.

Errors that should be noticed during component level testing and system integration testing, that creep into customer operations, are failures of quality assurance in the company and at the subcontractor level.

Like you said, the parts are rather mundane for aircraft parts. They usually form nice well-understood black-boxes for the aircraft manufacturer. If the quality assurance at all links in the production chain works.

And thats ultimatively a Boeing failure - because their management has to make sure that the selected subcontractors deliver at the assured quality. Not the Boeing engineers who designed the majority of the 787. But the engineers that had been responsible to define test cases for making sure all components delivered are to spec and work together as planned. And finally again the Boeing management, because I am damn sure, that they pushed an unfinished aircraft into the market, before the more conservative A350 arrives.

And especially not biased towards Boeing as US company doing everything perfectly fine and the USA are the greatest and quality assurance is communist B/S that doesn't produce any profit.

 

[boogabooga]

You say you are not biased, but then:

And finally again the Boeing management, because I am damn sure, that they pushed an unfinished aircraft into the market, before the more conservative A350 arrives.

Alright then.

You say exploding engines and wing stress fractures are unavoidable and can only be discovered in actual operations, then perhaps I can say battery and beacon problems are too. You just assume that they weren't tested.

I'm not saying that Boeing as a U.S. company is the best at quality assurance, just not necessarily worse than, for example, certain European companies.

 

[Urwumpe]

You say exploding engines and wing stress fractures are unavoidable and can only be discovered in actual operations, then perhaps I can say battery and beacon problems are too. You just assume that they weren't tested.

Alrighty, maybe you have some other expectations on good quality assurance there:

One engine on one plane exploded. Explosion was uncontained because aerospace standards had been followed, but been inadequate for the powers of the rather new kind of intermediate stage turbines.

The error that caused the explosion was found to be an oil leak, that developed in all aircraft using that engine at different magnitudes over multiple hundred flight hours. While such oil leaks are usually no big deal, there are drain lines demanded by aerospace standards for that, this time it was causing a small local fire.

Error get fixed by simple thrust limitations while the investigation was running, and then by improving the failing seal in the Trent 900 engines.

For the 787 battery problems, we had multiple aircraft with the same problem. Problem was caused by a design decision, that optimized the battery capacity, but reduced the tolerance against such runaway effects. Runaways get caused by deep-discharges of the batteries, and had been proved to cause fires already in a lab in 2006. The electronics that should prevent such deep-discharges had been failing in component tests already very often, resulting in rapid deep discharges of the battery and molten metal in the power electronics regulating the discharge. Still the 787 got shipped to customers.

So, two steps in the failure plot happened already in ground tests. And got ignored by the management. Do you really think that is inevitable and comparable to the A380 problems?

The list of problems of the 787 is already a large thick book.

 

[kamaz]

Regarding the use of Li-Ion batteries on Dreamliner: it is obvious to me that whoever came up with the idea did not do his homework. Li-Ion battery is inherently unsafe.

1. Li-Ion batteries suffer from the problem of dendrite growth -- basically, lithium whiskers start growing from one electrode towards the other. When dendrite touches the other electrode, the battery shorts, and starts to heat. But since the short is internal to the device, there is nothing which can be done.

2. It has been suggested that this problem is made worse by thermal cycling. Think +50C on tarmac, -50C at cruise altitude.

3. Some electrolyte compositions contain oxygen. As battery heats (due to short), the electrolyte breaks up, releasing oxygen. Lithium then reacts with oxygen, i.e. starts burning. Note that since oxygen is present in the cell, cutting off oxygen supply will not extinguish the fire.

 

[garyw]

I'm starting to wonder if, in 10 years time we'll look back on the 787 as something of a white elephant that few people bought.

Aircraft manufacturing giant Airbus has announced its first deal with Japanese carrier Japan Airlines (JAL).
It has won an order from JAL for 31 of its A350 planes, in a deal worth nearly $9.5bn (£5.9bn) at list prices.
The A350 is designed to be more fuel-efficient and is a direct competitor to US rival Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, which has been hit by safety and technical issues in recent months.
The deal is a blow for Boeing, which has dominated Japan's aviation market.
"This is Airbus' largest order for the A350 so far this year and is the largest ever order we have received from a Japanese airline," said Fabrice Bregier, chief executive of Airbus.
"I must say that achieving this breakthrough order and entering a traditional competitor market was one of my personal goals."
According to the deal, JAL also has an option to purchase an additional 25 planes.

Source and more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24424873

 

[Urwumpe]

I'm starting to wonder if, in 10 years time we'll look back on the 787 as something of a white elephant that few people bought.

Well, this one could be a simple diversification strategy, which is maybe a sign of growing distrust to Boeing. But nothing too big yet.

It would be a bad omen, if Boeing has no 787 orders at one of the major aerospace fairs suddenly. That would be a marketing disaster.

 

[tl8]

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A350_XWB_orders"]List of Airbus A350 XWB orders - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]
[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_787_orders_and_deliveries"]List of Boeing 787 orders and deliveries - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

Interesting comparison of the numbers of order.
The Order book has 756 for A350 and 945 for 787.

Most of the operators that are using both have ordered more Airbuses.

However there are more small buyers of the 787.