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Boeing is in the midst of a three-week halt in structural deliveries from its 787 suppliers, the fourth such stoppage this year, the company confirms.

DUBAI — Airbus has yet to decide if the smallest member of the A320 family, the A318, will receive the company’s new engine option (neo), though if it does happen, the airframer’s corporate jetliner business will drive the decision.

“Clearly the case for the A318 is on the corporate jet side.” says Francois Chazelle, vice president Airbus corporate and private aviation.

As a commercial platform, the 110-seat A318, powered with CFM International CFM56-5B or Pratt & Whitney PW6000 engines, has fallen flat in the marketplace, as has its 737-600 competitor, having sold just 60 for airlines.

An additional 23 A318s have been sold as the Elite model of the Airbus Corporate Jetliner family, which now represent all the outstanding orders for the type.

The A318 also competes in the same market as the 110 to 125-seat CS100,
the smaller of two CSeries models being developed by Bombardier, which
will enter service in 2013.

The A318 remains in a commercial niche today, operating, for example, as an 32-seat all business class operation for British Airways out of London City Airport to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York with a westbound fuel and customs stop in Shannon, Ireland.

With rough technical specifications for an A318neo undefined, it remains unclear whether or not the combination of sharklets and a new engine would be able to fly the westbound mission without the stop.

Bombardier has said it is able to fly the British Airways trans-atlantic mission non-stop with the CS100, fitted with its Pratt & Whitney PW1524G engines.

Airbus announced December 1 it had selected the PW1100G and Leap-X
starting with the A320neo in 2016, later extending to the A321 and A319.

Photo of Note: Sunset over Dubai, originally uploaded by flightblogger.

DUBAI — We’re now all set up here at MEBA and we had a partial working day here. While the show doesn’t officially begin until Tuesday, business aviation news will begin flowing on Monday in earnest. Interestingly enough, this brilliant sunset is the last of my 27th year and I’ll be celebrating another successful trip around the Sun on Tuesday. Thanks everyone for making it a wonderful and incredibly memorable year. Onward, indeed.

Travel Night and Day: IAD-DXB, originally uploaded by flightblogger.

Back in the sky again for my last trip of 2010. This final swing will take me to Dubai for the Middle Eastern Business Aviation (MEBA) show for the next week. I’ve got 13h and 3min to try United’s new 777 economy with Panasonic AVOD and in-seat power on a direct flight from Dulles on UA976. (reg anyone?) This 777 is one of the first seven newly in the fleet with the new interior. The new layout switches from the original 1995 2-5-2 economy layout to 3-3-3. The tail end of the roughly two-week trip will have an IFE and interiors component to it and I’ll have more on that later. For now, it’s time to fly. Catch you on the other side.

Make no mistake about it, the Bombardier has been successful on at least one indisputable point. Airbus and Boeing have been forced to respond to the CSeries.

Airbus will launch a re-engined version of its A320 family aircraft Wednesday, for entry into service in 2016, say industry sources.

Just out from Boeing:

Boeing has readied ZA002, the 787 flight test airplane that experienced an electrical fire on Nov. 9, to be flown from Laredo, Texas, to Seattle. Maintenance technicians replaced the damaged P100 power distribution panel, repaired damage to interior composite structure and installed new insulation material.

The team in Laredo, Texas, has completed a series of ground test operations and inspections to validate the repairs. The flight, which is expected to occur soon, will not include test operations.

Boeing says ZA002 will ferry to Boeing Field, joining ZA001, ZA003, ZA005 and ZA006. ZA004 flew to Everett for maintenance operations on November 21. ZA002 is scheduled to depart Laredo at 2 PM local time for a return to Boeing Field at 4:24 PM PST, though departure, enroute and arrival times tend to vary greatly.

In other 787 production news, JA822J, the third aircraft for JAL was fitted with its twin General Electric GEnx-1B engines. This will make it the first production 787 with GE engines.

The fitting provides a good indication of the potential delivery order for the early aircraft, with program sources saying Airplane 23 will likely be the third or fourth production aircraft to fly in with the pack of Airplanes Seven, Eight and Nine for ANA. The aircraft’s destination: Lackland Air Force Base for activation of Boeing’s 787 change incorporation and refurbishment operation in San Antonio, Texas.

Though, production flights are farther down a short but non-negotiable to-do list for Boeing, which first has to establish a new schedule for the program while designing, validating and implementing its electrical system software and hardware changes, while satisfying the FAA that the 787 test fleet can return to flight operations.

“We have another several weeks of work to do to get the fix in place,” Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Jim Albaugh told Reuters today. “Once we understand the fix, we’ll be able to tell you what the impact on the schedule.”

First day back at my desk in DC since November 12 following China and Thanksgiving, and I’m a bit slow getting back up to speed today, but wanted to share some Monday news items to chew on:

ANA says 787 delays are “a great disappointment” and the carrier is “pushing” Boeing to “present the detailed cause of the irregularities” resulting from the November 9, ZA002 fire, while China Eastern is considering canceling its order for 15 787s over the delays, which are estimated to stretch another six months.

Meanwhile, A350 supplier Aerolia plans to begin production of the composite nose panels and shells for MSN001 on Tuesday after Spirit AeroSystems made its first 64ft 6in Section 15 crown panel in North Carolina last week. Delivery of the first production aircraft is now slated for the second half of 2013. Meanwhile in Sydney, the Qantas A380 fleet is returning to service again, gradually.

On the engine front, CSeries’ PW1524G powerplant has passed 80h of testing, and Pratt & Whitney says: “We have not uncovered anything that tells us we need a major design or architecture change.” Though Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker has cooled again to CSeries, just as SAS says it’s the leading contender for a 55-aircraft order.

On the business jet side of things heading for the Middle Eastern Business Aviation show in Dubai next week, it looks like landing gear supplier Heroux-Devtek has won a contract for a Dassault business jet that Dassault whose existence the airframer has not yet announced.

Over on the new content side of things, here’s an up close look at the ARJ21 from Zhuhai:

Boeing says its first 787 delivery will slide due to software and minor hardware changes to the electrical system, an assessment the company says will be completed within “the next few weeks.”

The airframer needs to implement changes to the software that manages and protect power distribution on the aircraft, as well as a minor hardware change to the P100 distribution panel to prevent foreign object debris (FOD) ingestion.

“We have successfully simulated key aspects of the on-board event in
our laboratory and are moving forward with developing design fixes,”
says 787 vice president and general manager Scott Fancher

Boeing says foreign debris “most likely” caused the November 9 fire aboard ZA002 that has halted 787 certification operations.

The company adds that “engineers have determined the fault began as either a short circuit or an electrical arc in the P100 power distribution panel” which sits against the left wall of the 787’s aft electronic equipment bay and manages power generated by the aircraft’s left engine.

Randy Tinseth, Boeing vice president of marketing, says: “Whatever this foreign debris was, it wasn’t something big – such as a tool – it was probably something small. We’re taking the right steps to ensure the power distribution panels are better protected against foreign debris.”

Boeing says it remains unsure how the FOD got into the P100 panel in the first place, and could have been in the panel for sometime, though the company concedes it won’t know how it got there.

As for the six grounded flight test aircraft, Boeing has not yet determined whether or not the design changes would have to be implemented before resuming certification activities, saying only: “Boeing is developing a plan to enable a return to 787 flight test activities and will present it to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as soon as it is complete.”

In the interim, Boeing will continue ground testing the fleet and may ferry ZA003 from Everett to Boeing Field in the near future.

Boeing says it is now “assessing the time required to complete the design changes and software updates that are being developed.”

In the 15 days since ZA002, Boeing’s second of six 787 flight test aircraft, suffered a fire in its aft electrical equipment bay, forcing a fleet-wide halt in certification testing, the airframer is days, if not hours, away from releasing its findings of its investigation and disclosing the impact to the aircraft’s first delivery, say company and industry sources.

An additional delay to the 787’s entry into service with All Nippon Airways is now a virtual certainty, the length of that delay, however, is yet unknown.

While some analysts have suggested the 787’s first delivery could slip to 2012, an additional delay of more than nine months, Boeing’s previous six delays have never shifted the schedule more than six months at a time. A six month slide beyond today’s February 2011 plan would place handover to ANA around August of 2011, more than three years after its original target.

Equally important in establishing the root cause of the fire, reported to be foreign object debris (FOD) that caused a short in the panel, is ensuring primary electrical system redundancy remains intact if such an incident were to reoccur. One program source indicates FOD clogging an air duct that cools the P100 panel may be a culprit.

The Seattle Times, citing a source close to the program, reported the 787 fleet, including 23 production aircraft in Everett, have been searched for FOD.

Though the fire, which happened while on approach to Laredo, Texas, and its root cause, revealed an Achillies heel in the 787’s electrical system that must be resolved before the Dreamliner can enter service.

In an internal message to program employees last week, Scott Fancher, 787 program manager and general manager said “we have made good progress in replicating the effects in our integration labs”.

While the specific “effects” have not been disclosed, under normal operation, a drop out of the P100 panel, feeding electricity from the left engine’s twin variable frequency starter generators (VSFG) to aircraft systems, should have compensated by prioritizing the flow of electricity from the right VSFGs into the healthy P200 panel for distribution. Instead, the fire caused 787 to perceive it had lost electrical power completely, causing the Hamilton Sundstrand-built ram air turbine (RAT) to deploy.

The RAT supplies just 10 kVA of electricity, a fraction of the up to 1.45 megawatts of power generated by the aircraft’s primary systems, including the APS-5000 auxiliary power unit (APU). Sources familiar with the incident say the APU, which supplies power to the P150 power distribution panel, was not running at the time of the fire.

The result, was the loss of four of five, heads down displays (HDD) and the twin heads up displays (HUD), as well as autothrottle control and a “cascading” series of failures.

However, Boeing concluded that with its twin Trent 1000 engines still running, ZA002 was “in a configuration that could have been sustained for the time required to return to an airport suitable for landing from any point in a typical 787 mission profile,” a defense of the 2008 Federal Aviation Administration’s special condition imposed on the aircraft’s electrical system, as well as its sought-after extended twin engine operations (ETOPS) certification.

Since their November 9 grounding, Boeing has received permission from the FAA to relocate three 787s. ZA001 and ZA005 returned to Boeing Field from remote testing in South Dakota and California, respectively, and ZA004 was ferried to the company’s Everett facility for maintenance.

Fancher added “re-positioning these airplanes back to Seattle will better prepare us for any modification that are needed as a result of this event.”

The extent of those modifications is another unknown and covers a wide spectrum of possibilities from a limited software modification all the way to complete redesign of the more-electric systems architecture of the 787.

At its inception, the Boeing used the 787 to push the outer envelope aerospace manufacturing, materials and systems, the three attributes that define an aircraft’s development.

The airframer had encountered great pain with the 787’s globally distributed supply chain in 2007 and 2008, a composite structural flaw in the aircraft’s side-of-body in 2009, and now in 2010 a potentially significant change to the aircraft’s electrical system.

Late discovery of design changes following treacherous incidents is not new to Boeing commercial development programs. 

Nearly 28 years to the day earlier, the third of five 757 flight test aircraft suffered severe engine damage during a natural ice build up test on its Rolls-Royce RB211 engines, 

An FAA representative onboard the aircraft, which was also being co-piloted by an FAA pilot, said at the time of the incident remarked: “We almost lost one.”

The incident prompted a late design change engine that was not validated by the FAA until nearly the last minutes before the type was handed over to Eastern Airlines in late 1982, followed by its January 1983 entry into service.