With three months and seven days since the 787’s December’s first flight, four Dreamliners have taken flight, accumulating roughly 360hr of flight time. Boeing is moving into the heart of its flight test program after completing both flutter and ground effects testing, with Type Inspection Authorization (TIA) by the Federal Aviation Administration expected by month’s end.
The other thing, if you did the math, when we talk about 7000 hours when you add up the ground test and flight test, and that adds up to longer than the flight test duration, if you just did testing. Well, there’s a tremendous amount of concurrency in the test, so one test flight might be checking off 5-6 hours of written test objective. You can’t take that math and divide by 24 and 31 because you’ll get the wrong answer.
We did burn a little bit. And, really, what it was– It was really two things – getting the efficiency on the flight test program up. Right now, it’s above where we wanted it to be. And the other thing is getting the turnaround of the airplanes, so we can get the hours in the airplane each and every day. And I think we’ve been able to address that. Again, a little slow in getting up to the learning curve. I think we’re there right now. Last week, we had three airplanes up simultaneously. And I think, at the end of this month, we get our certificate, which will allow us to bring the flight engineers– to bring the FAA onto the airplane and to really get into a lot of testing. So that should happen by the end of this month.
This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.
This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.