Boeing's jumbo-jet delays worry outside engineering experts

Beset by aerodynamic and mechanical gremlins, Boeing on Thursday pushed out initial delivery of the 747-8, the new, larger version of its jumbo jet, by six months into the middle of 2011.

Boeing said two separate vibration problems — one on the wing tip, the other in the mechanism that extends and retracts a hinged control surface on the wing — could not have been predicted in advance of flight tests.

Spokesman Tim Bader said Boeing expects to solve the wing-tip vibration with software. It also is redesigning the device, called an actuator, that moves the wing control surface.

"That is why we flight test," Bader added. "You identify issues and make the necessary refinements."

Yet Boeing's struggles to surmount those problems, and the proliferation of delays in other programs — the 787 Dreamliner and the Italian Air Force tanker are way behind schedule, too — worry outside engineering experts.

"Boeing just hasn't been performing up to par, if you define par as how Boeing used to perform up through the 777," said Hans Weber, president of San Diego-based technical-aviation consultancy Tecop International.

Stan Sorscher, an analyst with the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), the white-collar union at Boeing, said the delays point to fundamental cultural problems within Boeing, specifically the primacy of budget constraints and an unwillingness to acknowledge issues as they arise.

"This is a failure of the business model and of the problem-solving culture," Sorscher said. "Outsourcing contributed to it, but the real problem is bigger than that."

Boeing's Bader said engineers believe the wing-tip vibration can be solved by programming the computer that manages the flight controls to avoid certain stresses in specific circumstances. He said flight tests of the software this past weekend were encouraging.

"We're still investigating it. But the preliminary results have been positive," Bader said. "We're also testing the redesign of the actuator. Those results have been promising as well."

Weber, an expert on aerodynamics, agreed with Boeing that a major change to an airframe — such as the new wing on the 747-8 — can create aerodynamic vibration that is hard to predict and may only show up in flight testing. It may take the form of mild oscillation or of a more destructive and powerful vibration called flutter.

"That just happens," Weber said. One major reason why the Italian tanker is about five years late is flutter caused by the addition of refueling pods near the wing tip.

Providing a software fix could mean the stress limits imposed by the computer will restrict the jet's range or capacity. "What will that do to the promised performance of the airplane?" Weber said.

Bader said more flight tests must be completed "before we can get a clear picture of the performance."

Sorscher said he has been hearing complaints from engineers for several years about a lack of communication within the airplane-development programs and a growing reluctance to bring bad news to the attention of managers who don't want to hear it.

"Boundaries have been more rigid," said Sorscher. "And the awareness that we've got a problem has come more slowly."

He said unrealistic budgets and the constant demand to conserve resources and manpower have led to "wishful thinking as problem solving."

Exacerbating that, he said, Boeing moved much of the early design work on the 747-8 from the Puget Sound area.

It gave a major role to engineers at Boeing's Moscow Design Center and at outside suppliers.

"It's a different model than we had 20 years ago, when we'd hire all the people and put them in a building in Seattle," Jeff Peace, then vice president for the 747-8 program, said in a teleconference in July 2006. "We're recognizing and utilizing the world's capability in engineering."

In Moscow, Boeing hired around 1,000 engineers who worked much more cheaply than those here. In 2003, Sergei Kravchenko, president of Boeing Russia, in an e-mail subsequently obtained by The Seattle Times, had promised Boeing's leadership total labor rates "approximately 1/3 to 1/5 of the U.S. cost while meeting Boeing standards for quality and schedule."

One of the outside suppliers on the 747-8 program was Stork Fokker, a Dutch firm whose engineers worked on the wing's trailing edge. That trailing edge is where the now-troublesome control surface mechanism is.

But Boeing's Bader insisted that the problems discovered in flight tests "are not a result of bringing on external engineering firms to augment our design efforts."

Wherever blame lies, the consequence is a financial hit. With the latest delay, initial delivery is now more than 18 months behind schedule.

The 747-8 has only 109 firm orders. Boeing will have to sell many more to get back its development costs, which are soaring with the extra work to fix the problems.

Yet Boeing said Thursday the delay will not affect its financial results this year. That's due to Boeing's accounting methods.

The company spreads the costs of developing a new plane over an initial number of aircraft it is confident it can sell. Typically that's around 400 airplanes for a brand-new jet like the 787 Dreamliner, much less for a derivative like the 747-8.

If at some point anticipated expenses exceed the expected revenue from that designated block of aircraft, the company's accountants must record charges known as "reach-forward losses."

After the previous delays on the 747-8 program, Boeing recorded reach-forward losses of $1.4 billion in 2009 and $685 million in 2008.

In July, Boeing said it increased the undisclosed size of the 747 accounting block by 25 airplanes, meaning it is confident it can sell that many more of the jets.

Based on the market value of the jet as estimated by aviation-consultancy firm Avitas, that extension gave Boeing around $4.5 billion in extra anticipated revenue as a buffer against a further loss charge.

The only previous Boeing jet in a forward-loss position was the 737NG, which recorded losses of $700 million in 1997 and $350 million in 1998 after major manufacturing snarls that halted production in Renton.

That jet, also a major update to an older plane with a new wing and new engines, nevertheless went on to become a highly profitable success.

Almost 3,400 have rolled out since the first 737NG delivery in 1997, and more than 2,000 more are still on order.

However, the potential market for the 737 was enormous. Boeing acknowledges that the market for the 747-8 is very much smaller.

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