787 delivery may slide into next year

Boeing warned Thursday that delays in the 787 Dreamliner flight-test program may push the first delivery of the new jet into next year.

"Our plan remains to deliver the airplane by the end of the year," said Scott Fancher, head of the 787 program in a teleconference call. "As a cautionary note, we could see it move a few weeks into the New Year."

The widely anticipated Dreamliner is already two and a half years late.

The main factor in the potential additional delay is that fitting out flight-test planes with new test instrumentation as they move from one block of tests to another is taking longer than planned, Fancher said.

As a result, the test airplanes have sometimes been on the ground between tests for weeks at a time as flight-test monitoring devices and wiring have been installed.

"A handful of instrumentation changes simply took a bit longer and stacked up on each other in a way we had not anticipated," said Fancher. "This is a flight-test program. There are a lot of uncertainties when you are testing."

Progress has also been held up by the inspections and rework necessary to fix several assembly issues with the planes already built, including the recently discovered quality problem in assembly of the horizontal tails.

Fancher said the tail issue is now resolved on all five Dreamliners currently in flight test at Boeing Field and in California.

The tail rework on Dreamliner No. 3, which will fly to London this weekend for an appearance at the Farnborough Air Show, was completed Wednesday and afterward the airplane flew twice for more than eight hours of testing.

"We're continuing to rework and inspect as necessary any production airplanes as well," he said.

The horizontal tails are assembled in Italy by 787 partner Alenia. To avoid the problem in future airplanes, Fancher said, "We've gone back to review the assembly instructions to make sure they are clear, concise and easy to understand for the assembly workers."

He said the problem was not a result of a miscommunication due to language differences, but was a "straightforward assembly quality issue."

The tail problem "was one area" that delayed progress on flight tests, Fancher said, "and we've seen a handful of other things that are part of the normal course of business."

Fancher said early customers, including Japanese airline ANA, which will take the first airplane, are being kept informed.

And he stressed that the problems slowing progress toward delivery of the first airplane are in the flight-test program and in assembly work, not with the Dreamliner design.

"None of the issues ... have had anything to do with airplane performance," Fancher said. "It is not an issue with the design or with the airplane."

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