In another effort to avoid a further entry into service slide of the 787, Boeing is reportedly adding four flight test aircraft to the fleet. According to a report by Buckingham Research, Boeing will add Airplanes Seven through Ten to the flight test campaign. All told, The Rolls-Royce test fleet will grow to eight. Airplanes Seven through Nine are all destined for ANA, while Airplane Ten will be delivered to LAN. The report suggests that the additional four aircraft will take part in ETOPS and functionality and reliability (F&R) testing, suggesting that the aircraft will not require the extensive instrumentation unlike the first six 787s.
ZA102, Airplane Nine, was set to join the flight test campaign this fall, but was derailed following the uncontained engine failure of the aircraft’s Trent 1000s during a ground test in Derby, UK. Aviation Week’s Guy Norris reports that the August 2 failure was traced to a build up of oil inside engine.
UPDATE: LAN has selected Rolls-Royce Trent 1000s, not General Electric GEnx-1Bs, as previously posted. I confused LAN’s aircraft with Airplanes 17 and 19 for Royal Air Maroc, which were initially allocated as Trent 1000-powered 787s, but were fitted with GEnx pylons during the assembly process.
UPDATE 4:40 PM ET: Boeing statement on the Buckingham Research report:
There will be limited testing on two additional airplanes for a total of eight airplanes (not four for a total of 10). The additional testing is driven by the requirement that some of the testing be done on airplanes in production configuration as opposed to flight test configuration. One airplane will do some ground testing. The other will do some flight testing.
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This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.