Tag: FlightBlogger Archive

Travel Day: NRT-HKG – World’s First 787 Flight, originally uploaded by flightblogger.

TOKYO — It’s quite early in the morning (late at night) here in Japan and jetlag is right on time. With checkout from the hotel literally hours away to go back to the airport, I felt rather than tossing and turning, it was better to publish part one of the video journal from this week’s 787 service entry with All Nippon Airways. Part one – “Getting There” – takes you onboard ANA flight 9 from JFK to NRT and inside the cabin with the airline’s new long-haul product. Follow Twitter updates from me and newly-minted Singapore-based Flightglobal journo Mavis Toh for all the latest on the 787’s maiden service from Narita to Hong Kong.

Travel Day (and Night): JFK-NRT, originally uploaded by flightblogger.

NEW YORK — I’m waiting for my flight to Tokyo at John F. Kennedy International Airport and I wanted to share Flightglobal’s 787 service entry special report. The package, but together by Flight journalists John Croft, Siva Govindasamy, Michael Gubisch, Max Kingsley-Jones, Mary Kirby, Steve Trimble, Niall O’Keeffe and myself, covers many elements of the program. The supplement, which was published last week, looks both forward and backward at how Boeing arrived at this moment, tracing the origins of the aircraft and its supply chain and examining what the future holds for the first majority composite jetliner in the cabin, the market and in operation.

There’s also a companion website that goes with the package, that includes even more content, as well as an interactive cutaway of ANA’s first 264-seat 787-8, which enters service on Wednesday between Tokyo Narita and Hong Kong.

UPDATE 10/24: The first panels from Spirit were delivered on Sunday. Operating as Polet Flight 4478, the An-124 departed from Kinston enroute to Bangor on Saturday for a fuel stop before crossing the Atlantic for St. Nazaire. The Wichita Eagle reported the shipment included the two side and crown panels (shown in blue and green), while the lower panels (shown in purple) will be delivered by the end of the year. Final build-up of the center fuselage is set to begin in early 2012, pushing the Airbus final assembly target for MSN001 MSN5000 into next year.

The An-124 will likely be a rare sight in Kinston as
Spirit plans to typically deliver its fuselage panels by boat to France, while its wing spars, also built in North Carolina, will be dispatched to Prestwick,
Scotland on their way to Broughton in the UK. The shipment will include the 65 ft-long upper crown panel, twin side panels that include door three, and lower shells, weighing nearly 9,000lbs.

Already awaiting the arrival of the panels is the aircraft’s center wing box, which was delivered to the Airbus St. Nazaire site on August 9. Once complete, Section 15 will move to Airbus next door for mating with the lower shell, center wing box and keel beam.

While no less of a complex supply chain compared to Boeing’s 787
operations, St. Nazaire serves an
integration supersite, that will bring together the completed center
section components before being flown to Toulouse aboard the A300-600ST Beluga.
Despite being completely separate entities, Airbus has opted for a supersite model that places its supplier’s operation in the same
area as its own activities. Notably, Spirit is the only major
structural supplier on the A350 that is not either Airbus itself or one of its
subsidiaries.

Video and Graphic Credit Spirit AeroSystems

UPDATE 10/21: Boeing emphasizes its selection of its initial accounting quantity is not determined in an effort to “maintain a position of profitability”, but rather is determined through a “multi-diciplinary process”…”independently of the profitability calculation in accordance with GAAP and rigorous, externally audited procedures.” The company says the figure, which will be disclosed on Wednesday, “is our estimate of the quantity of airplanes that will be produced for delivery under existing and anticipated contracts. It is bounded by our ability to make reasonably dependable estimates of both revenue and cost.”

Large aerospace projects use an accounting method known as program accounting, which allows Boeing to take the total sum of its upfront investment and spread it across a block of deliveries. As Boeing explained in its 1998 Annual Report (PDF):

Commercial aircraft programs are planned, committed and facilitized based on long-term delivery forecasts, normally for quantities in excess of contractually firm orders. Cost of sales for the 737, 747, 757, 767 and 777 commercial aircraft programs is determined under the program method of accounting based on estimated average total cost and revenue for the current program quantity.

The program method of accounting effectively amortizes or averages tooling and special equipment costs, as well as unit production costs, over the program quantity. Because of the higher unit production costs experienced at the beginning of a new program and the substantial investment required for initial tooling and special equipment, new commercial jet aircraft programs normally have lower operating profit margins than established programs.

While the final figure will not be known until next week, Boeing CFO
James Bell said on the company’s second quarter earnings call on July 27: “Given the tremendous success of this
product in the marketplace with
over 820 airplanes in backlog. The initial accounting quantity will be
substantially higher than previous new program initial quantities.”

This represents a significant shift in Boeing’s historical accounting behavior, according to that same 1998 report:

“The initial program quantities for the 777 program and the 737-600/700/800/900 (Next-Generation 737) programs had been established at 400 units, the same initial program quantity as used for the 747, 757 and 767 programs.”

Bell’s justification for raising the initial accounting quantity due to the 787’s “the tremendous success of this product in the marketplace” – whose orders now stand at 797 – only further illustrates the break with the company’s past accounting practices. The Next Generation 737 had accumulated around 700 orders at the time of the 737-700’s first delivery to Southwest in December 1997, breaking 800 in March 1998, 900 in May and 1,000 by August. At the time, it was the fastest selling aircraft in commercial aviation history.

Despite the unprecedented sales success, after its late 1997 production debacle that significantly slowed the company’s production ramp up, Boeing declared it wouldn’t make a penny on any of its first 400 Next Generation 737 deliveries, and in fact, it would lose $1.05 billion across all 400.

Boeing CEO Jim McNerney said at the 787’s first delivery he expected the
program to breakeven before the end of the decade. The “breakeven”
was not on its entire investment, but rather on a recurring basis,
meaning that by sometime before 2020 each 787 that is delivered will sell
for a price higher than it cost to build the aircraft.

Conversely,
McNerney’s statement indicates that each 787 delivery between now and 2015 – at the earliest – will lose money, before revenue can even begin to pay off the initial investment, let alone the lost cash on each of the deliveries that preceded. Boeing holds $16.2 billion in inventory on 787s spread across some 40-plus aircraft as of June 30, averaging $300 to $400 million per aircraft.

On a program basis, UBS, JP Morgan and Bernstein Research all estimate it will take at least 1,000 deliveries to break even, while Air Lease CEO Steven Udvar-Hazy estimated the number to be as high as 1,500.

Though McNerney – referring to the company’s method of program accounting – assured reporters: “In the way these planes are accounted for, we will be profitable from day one.”  

With three and a half years of delays and billions in cost overruns and supplier acquisitions, Boeing is facing a precarious accounting question for how it manages its astronomical investment, especially in the face of hundreds of poorly priced orders that are weighing on its backlog. The disclosure that takes place next week may shape Boeing’s fortunes for decades to come.

A well-worn A380 MSN001 rolled out a hangar in Toulouse, France yesterday sporting a newly installed Rolls-Royce Trent XWB engine. The powerplant, rated at 84,000lbs of thrust, will continue to advance Rolls-Royce’s certification program for the new engine, which will eventually power the Airbus A350 XWB. The 118in (300cm) diameter fan of the Trent XWB-84 is only slightly larger than that of the three 116in (294cm) Trent 900s that are flying along side the XWB-84.

A shrunken A350-800, whose service entry has slipped to mid-2016, will be powered by a 75,000lb Trent-75, though the type has seen a steady flow of customers away from the variant.

For the A350-1000, a first engine run of its 97,000lb thrust fan is expected in mid-2014, with entry into service to follow three years later. The 2017 availability allows Rolls to incorporate technology from its three-shaft Advance3 engine design into the enhanced Trent XWB, though the improvement in performance on the A350-1000 has also drawn the ire of some customers.

The growing distance between airframe and engine commonality, which has always been a hallmark of Airbus aircraft family design, has frustrated customers like Emirates and Qatar Airways. Airbus says the -1000 will remain about 70% common with the baseline -900.

Enders, by his own acknowledgement, has made a “big jump” in technology with “a lot of unknowns” on the A350, which, at the insistence of customers, was required in 2006 to abandon its original composite wing and A330 metallic fuselage design. Enders’ attitude about the -1000 is illustrative of the balancing act
the airframer must walk between not increasing the complexity of its own
engineering and production operations – thus driving up its cost –
while managing the high expectations of its biggest customers.

Though Enders has drawn a line in the sand, telling Flight International the A350-1000 will not be changed to appease individual customers: “For us, that is the solution,” he said. “We’re not going to redesign it every half-year.”

Photos Credit Airbus

Without the prospect of a clean-sheet design from Western manufacturers seating 150 to 210 passengers for at least a decade and a half, improving the current and future generations of 737s and A320s has put incremental improvement at the forefront of aircraft design. From in-flight entertainment and lightweight seats to wingtip treatments, the opportunities for suppliers to exploit the airframe status quo will mean big business for those trying to wring every ounce of performance from existing designs. 

Joe Clark, CEO of Aviation Partners, redefined improvement in incremental efficiency a decade ago, transforming our visual expectations of what an efficient aircraft should look like, and now he’s trying to do it again.

This time, Clark and his team of aerodynamicists have taken the blended winglet concept and turned it on its head. Literally. Seattle-based Aviation Partners unveiled for the first time at NBAA in Las Vegas last week its blended split winglet concept. Building on the blended winglet that is fitted more than 4,500 aircraft and nearly every Next Generation 737 that exits Boeing’s Renton line, Aviation Partners has added a ventral strake and scimitar tips to the now-familiar design.

“The concept works for any airplane,” says Clark, whose enthusiasm for his product is almost contagious. “It puts very little load increase into the wing, which is good. It’s retrofittable on most winglets, both the scimitar tips and the ventral strake. We’ve done a lot of [computational fluid dynamics] work combining these all together to get us a performance of about 40% better than a normal winglet. So with winglets you’d get 5-7%, this you’ll get 7-9.5%.”

“For 2-3%, that’s a huge number” for airlines whose biggest single cost is fuel, says Clark.

The retrofit package, he estimates, would see the skins removed from the airplane, installing a clevis fitting and some local beef up of the winglet, and would cost roughly $240,000 for operators, or about 40% more than the $600,000 for an existing set of winglets. 

For airframers, the cost of developing a new aircraft, achieving a 20% improvement in fuel efficiency can run $7-10 billion, a conservative estimate as illustrated by the A380 and 787. To achieve an improvement of 2%, estimates Clark, runs at $30 to 40 million for a flight test and certification campaign, just 3% of the cost compared to an all-new clean sheet development program. 

That exponential growth in the cost of an all-at-once leap in efficiency underscores the challenge of building all-new aircraft in the 21st century. Applying Red-Blue and London School of Economics academic Dr. Theodore Piepenbrock’s Theory of the Evolution of Business Ecosystems, fewer options exist for major leaps in improvement. The mature “Red” environment of jetliner manufacturing likens steady incremental improvement to designing a better camel, a system built for long-term resilience not short-term speed, explains Piepenbrock’s work.

“I’ve always told people that we’re like what AMG is to Mercedes,” says Clark of Aviation Partners’ work. “They build fabulous cars, we just improve the performance of them. We’re the refiners. As long as these big companies look at us that way, we can be very helpful to them.”

The new patented scimitar tips, says Clark, are airfoils in themselves, contributing a half-percent to the overall drag improvement: “The scimitar adds quite a bit. Our CFD analysis shows the more careful you are with these tip vortexes, the better the performance is, so we’ve refined it to quite a good level in studying this area.”

The company’s experience developing and proving the efficiency gains with winglets has been significantly refined with its proprietary CFD models, each of which is tailored to a given airframe before they’re even flown. 

“When we did the 767 winglets, we never did a prototype and we hit the performance within one-tenth of one percent,” said Clark, who also completed 75h of flight testing of a spiroid winglet design aboard his Falcon 50 earlier this year, validating an 11% improvement in drag.

Clark acknowledges that the new split design may not be right for all aircraft configurations: “Certain airplanes it’s more difficult because their wings are lower, but we may use part of it, for example on a Falcon, we may use the scimitar tip and not have the ventral strake. You wouldn’t get as much performance, but you’d get more. On a higher-wing airplane, one that’s got a high wings, engine pods below like a Boeing or and Airbus, it’s a lot easier.”

No decision has been made about an aircraft as a platform for flight testing the blended split winglet concept, though Clark hopes to begin flight testing in the next six months.