About 23 months ago, in the midst of arguably the most chaotic period of the 787 program during the winter of 2008, Boeing quietly placed the short-range 787-3 on the back burner, shifting much-needed engineering resources toward the 787-8 and follow-on 787-9.
Since that time, the 787-3 has been on a slow descent toward joining a collection of never-built aircraft variants. That descent ended today as ANA zeroed-out the -3 order book; converting its 28 remaining short-range Dreamliners to long-range -8s.
While Boeing has not formally changed the status of the 787-3 as an aircraft for sale, it has now entered a gray area of a “market viability study” that will determine whether or not it ever gets built.
The short-range -3 was given life as a mark on a whiteboard on October 26, 2002, when Boeing gathered the strategic thinkers of the world’s biggest airlines together. They were asked to label a graph, the horizontal axis was range and the vertical was seat count. Those marks eventually became the 787-8, 787-9 and 787-3.
While the attendants of the meeting were never disclosed, the airline(s) indicating a preference for the 787-3, a high-capacity, short-range wide-body, later became clear as the order book climbed toward its peak of over 900 orders, 43 of which were for the 787-3 from JAL (13) and ANA (30). In fact, when it ordered what was then the 7E7 in 2004, the -3 made up the majority of their respective orders.
In fact, the 787-3 was widely believed to be a major enticement to All Nippon Airways to serve as launch customer for the 787. When it was first launched, the 787-3 would follow just in 2010, two years behind the 787-8 set to be delivered in May 2008 as a replacement for the A300 and 767.
Though, engineers who were closely involved in the development of the 787-3 say the biggest challenge the aircraft faced was was its weight and whether enough structure could be removed to reduce the empty weight of the aircraft, while upping the seat count and delivering significant enough gains in efficiency over the shorter domestic routes. One person close to the program even speculated that a newly wingletted 767-300ER could have been extremely competitive against the 787-3.
Steven Udvar-Hazy, head of the International Lease Finance Corporation said at the Singapore Air Show in February 2008, that he preferred “another version of the 787 that is lighter, that addresses more the performance capabilities at…more the medium haul end of the market.”
Regarding the 787-3, he quickly added that:
That might be a more practical product line that will have a wider application with more customers than the -3 and we’re encouraging Boeing to come up with a 787 derivative to address that middle market which has wide global appeal to airlines in North America, European airlines, Middle East, China and South America and intra-Asia and US trans-con market and so forth. The -3 doesn’t quite do it. It seems too heavy.
Yet, in the end, for ANA and JAL – which converted its orders to -8s in June – it all came down the non-specific timeline for when they could actually receive their first -3. Officially, Boeing never publicly committed to anything more than “The 787-3…will now become the second derivative of the airplane family.”
In a statement earlier today, Boeing said it simply came down to the wishes of its very patient customer: “The 787-8 is available sooner for delivery than the 787-3 would be.”
With the 787-3 now in an amorphous phase of its existence, Boeing has an opportunity to look at the 787-3 to see if it may find new life as Mr. Hazy’s much desired mid-range wide-body.
Where one door closes, another opens.
Photo Credit Boeing
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This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.