Boeing's day to boast, show 787 flying ahead

PARIS — Boeing's 787 Dreamliner dominated the second day of the Paris Air Show on Tuesday.

As a huge deal pushed sales to an astonishing 634 firm orders before the first one rolls out, Boeing offered evidence that production of the 787 is on track.

The head of the 787 program, Mike Bair, displayed slides of the final assembly of airplane No. 1 in Everett, showing a jet that's coming together impressively.

The joining process is reassuringly far along, allaying concerns over recent leaked photos that showed a gap between the big sections at the front.

Bair denied a JP Morgan analyst's report that the schedule may slip four months, saying he expects the plane to fly in September.

"We are where we need to be," he said.

After Bair's presentation, Steve Udvar-Hazy, the chief executive of International Lease Finance Corp. (ILFC), signed his much-anticipated order for 52 Dreamliners as part of an $8.8 billion deal that also included ten 737s and one 777.

"The 787 represents what the world needs tomorrow," Hazy said at the news conference.

And with a little jab at Airbus' big wave of orders Monday, some of which were not finalized, he emphasized ILFC's announcement was a firm order, not a memorandum of understanding.

"We've already sent the money to Seattle two days ago," he said.

With typical discounts, the order is valued at about $5.9 billion, according to data from Avitas.

An even larger contest looms for updating the fleet of Delta Air Lines.

Echoing CEO Gerald Grinstein's comments in a Seattle Times interview last month, the airline's chief operating officer told The Wall Street Journal on Monday that Delta is likely to order as many as 125 of the Dreamliner jets by the end of the year.

Bair showed photos of the entire 787 fuselage joined together from nose to tail, along with the wings. He said the vertical fin is by now also in place and the horizontal stabilizer is being attached.

That first airplane looked well on track to roll out on schedule July 8.

Bair explained in detail the fuselage-gap problem.

He said the forward fuselage built by Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita, Kan., had sagged and bulged outward in one quadrant after some secondary parts were late and not put in position early enough to hold the shape.

The distortion was corrected in Everett. Engineers disconnected the internal structure and "pushed the bulge back in," Bair said.

He said the issue would have been much harder to fix if the plane were aluminum, which is less flexible than the 787's composite plastic.

The wings fit better, he said.

The left-hand wing was an insignificant 40/1,000ths of an inch out compared to an expected 0.5 to 1 inch expected in construction of current metal airplanes.

The right wing was "dead-on," Bair said.

"The fit-up of this is absolutely astounding," he added.

Alluding to the shortage of fasteners, which he said is "a struggle" but not a showstopper, Bair said that the airplane program is close to its climax.

"The fundamental big bets have gone better than we imagined," Bair said. "We're into nuts and bolts, no pun intended, the little stuff."

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com