There are several important differences, in fact, so many differences that, to get to certify a Boeing 787 as airworthy, you have to take a full Boeing-approved course for the aircraft, and not just a differences course between the 777 and 787.
The Boeing 787 is a whole new aircraft. The 777 was born in 1995; the 787 was born, delayed, in 2007. Customer deliveries started in 2012. That itself accounts for a significant difference.
Also, the 787 is an outgrowth of an earlier Boeing project known as the “Sonic Cruiser.”
October 26, 2002, was a cold, unsettling day for many Seattle citizens. The news that Saturday morning was full of stories about the bloody end to a Chechen hostage crisis in Moscow, as well as growing signs of imminent U.S. military intervention in Iraq. Just over a year had passed since the horrifying 9/11 attacks on America, and the world remained an uncertain place.
Few of those scurrying along Seattle’s busy waterfront on Alaskan Way could therefore have guessed that a meeting was taking place that morning at Pier 66 that would bring some much-needed good news and at the same time fundamentally alter the destiny of the world’s air transport industry. There, beneath steely gray skies and cold rain showers, delegates from a dozen airlines were quietly meeting with Boeing officials at the Bell Harbor Conference Center.
While decidedly low-key, the meeting was also pivotal. Boeing hoped, once and for all, that the gathering would help it figure out what the airlines wanted most in the next-generation airliner: speed or efficiency. No one knew for sure at the time, but it would decide not only Boeing’s design priorities for the twenty-first century, but also begin a chain reaction that would impact the aerospace industry for years to come.
Anchoring the meeting was Walt Gillette, a soft-spoken Texan with a reputation for solid engineering over a long career at Boeing stretching back to 1966. Gillette, who in media interviews referred to himself as “older than dirt,” had been involved in almost every Boeing jetliner since the 707. Now he was tasked with steering the company’s aircraft development in a bold new direction and away from the lower risk, lower-cost derivative approach of the past decade.
Gillette’s many achievements included a breakthrough installation design that enabled the low-slung 737 wing to be fitted with the high-bypass CFM56 engine. The move transformed the fortunes of the 737, effectively launching it into the history books as the best-selling airliner of all time. Now he was pursuing answers that would help plot Boeing’s commercial jetliner development course for the next fifty years or more.
Since early 2001, Boeing had been courting airlines with an intriguing high-speed design called the Sonic Cruiser. But all the time,Boeing had a “reference model” in its back pocket, a theoretical concept that shifted all the new technology in the Sonic Cruiser from speed to efficiency. The model, dubbed Project Yellowstone, was only meant to be a gauge against which the true advantages of the technology could be judged, but to Boeing’s surprise it started to attract just as much interest as, if not more than, the Sonic Cruiser
▲ The Sonic Cruiser, a two-hundred-to-three-hund
▲ Sonic Cruiser - Schematic. Designed with a double-delta or “cranked arrow” planform, it combined a high-speed inboard section with a higher aspect-ratio outboard section. Twin tails, slightly canted inboard, were mounted on the inboard sides of the engine nacelles, which were semi-recessed into the wing. Inlets with S-shaped ducts were tucked away beneath the leading edge of the wing, invisible on all the first artist impressions.
But was this interest real? Were the airlines really more interested in efficiency than the holy grail of higher speed? Of course, times were tough for some carriers after 9/11, but how many wanted efficiency and how many still demanded speed? Boeing had to know, and the huddle on that cold, overcast day on Seattle’s Pier 66 was the best way to find out.
In front of the top strategic planners for the top airlines, Gillette drew a graph on a whiteboard. Along the bottom of the graph was range, while the vertical axis was payload. “Some were clearly intrigued by the reference model, and some clearly wanted more speed. There were dots all over the graph,” he recollected.
“We told them this was not a decision meeting, but that Boeing had to decide what to offer,” recalled Gillette, who later viewed the meeting as one of the most productive he ever had. The results were gold dust.
After all the airline representatives left, Boeing gathered up the charts and reviewed the results. The airlines were virtually unanimous, and none gave a high rating to Sonic Cruiser’s Mach 0.98 cruise capability, while all gave maximum points to Yellowstone, which had a 20 percent cut in fuel burn relative to a 767.
The bottom line was that speed was out and efficiency was in.
From now on, the course was set, and the journey toward the Dreamliner had begun.
News of the project leaked out at the fledgling Sonic Cruiser stage, far earlier than Boeing wanted. But the reaction sparked an unprecedented level of interest that refused to dissipate when the project morphed into the 7E7 and later evolved into the 787 Dreamliner. In a new media world of instant web access, blogging, and twittering, the exposure was almost too much. “It was like working in a gold fish bowl,” former project leader Mike Bair once remarked.
▲ Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, Everett - Snohomish County / Paine Field (PAE / KPAE), USA - Washington, July 2007. The genesis of the 787 can be traced back to 1991, more than a decade before Boeing Commercial Airplanes President Alan Mulally’s December 2002 announcement of plans to focus on a new, super-efficient twinjet. Pictured at its rollout in July 2007, the 787’s smooth skin and flowing lines belie the complex genealogy encompassing everything from 747 replacement studies and supersonic airliner research to multirole fighter projects.
At first the spotlight was kind, and the project’s high-profile technology and innovations basked in the glow of success as record orders poured in. But problems derailed the project, and Boeing’s challenges turned the Dreamliner into an industrial nightmare. The public glare became the frightening spotlight of the inquisitor. Yet this intense scrutiny also revealed the true extent of the huge mountain Boeing had set out to climb with the 787, and which it still is on course to conquer as it brings the Dreamliner to market. To fundamentally change either design practice, or a production system, or structural design philosophy or systems architecture, is challenging enough—with the 787 Boeing undertook to change all of these at one time. This is why, in short, the 787 is the most delayed project in the company’s storied history.
Yet, in the long run, these are also the same reasons why the 787 is set to emerge as a revolutionary change for the commercial aerospace industry, and as a flagship for Boeing’s ambitions in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
In the mid-market, Boeing’s 767 was losing ground to the increasingly popular A330-200. With 777 technology there was no chance you’d ever get an aircraft better in cash operating costs than the 767 you’re trying to replace. There was no hope for something like that.
Duane Jackson, the chief engineer of new airplanes, said it was time Boeing took a hard look at an aircraft that would be capable of making a big leap in operating economics and fuel burn. He was talking about 10 percent better operating economics and 20 percent lower fuel burn.
The spark for Jackson’s enthusiasm came in spring 2000, when he gave a presentation to the structural organization on the theoretical benefits of composite wings.
At the time, Jackson was running two studies involving composites. One was a 737-size aircraft with a composite wing, which he hoped might even be built as a full-size demonstrator. The other was a composite fuselage, though with the structure comprising barrels made from composite panels rather than one-piece sections.
By mid-2000 it started to look encouraging.
The problem was how to get all this taken seriously in the upper echelons. This was 2000, and the large-scale use of composites for primary structure in the fuselage and wing was only recently emerging in combat aircraft and was unheard of in commercial airliners. Jackson needed to work the company system as much as the technology, and that could be just as risky, but the goals were worth it.
Jackson realized he needed the support of Phantom Works President David Swain. Phantom Works was Boeing’s advanced development group that had been absorbed with the 1996 McDonnell Douglas merger. Working to his advantage was Swain’s directive to “sell” the Phantom Works and its advanced technology throughout the Boeing enterprise. Jackson needed Swain and vice versa.
Behind the scenes Swain, a veteran whose career spanned from the Gemini rocket to the C-17 airlifter, discussed the merits of composites with Boeing Chairman and President Phil Condit, who in turn passed along his recommendations to Alan Mulally, president of Commercial Airplanes. Condit and Mulally were both top engineers in their own right, and their endorsement of the radical composites plan was passed along the line to John Roundhill, chief project engineer and the 777 chief engineer.
The scene was set, therefore, for a crucial evaluation of all the key technologies that would be brought to play in the next-generation airliner. “Jackson, Gillette, and Roundhill put together plans for a multidisciplinary team that over three months would look at aerodynamics, structures, systems, and operations. The so-called ninety-day study crucially included a Phantom Works contingent as well as Boeing’s commercial product development team.
The ninety-day study “had real high people” involved, said Jackson, and the authority to poach top people from various departments.
The ninety-day study focused on three main projects, which were code-named after U.S. national parks at the suggestion of Brian Nield, manager of new airplane product development. A conventional, Mach 0.85 cruise speed project took precedence and was called Yellowstone, while another was a high-speed design code-named Glacier. The third was a blended-wing-body (BWB) design inherited with the McDonnell Douglas merger and code-named Project Redwood.
Yellowstone became the Boeing 787.
One of the chief differences in structures is that the 787 is a composite aircraft: composite-fuselage aircraft and composite wings — the first such large passenger aircraft in the world.
Other significant changes in the 787 are also mostly fuel-burn oriented: no-engine-bleed air-conditioning and anti-ice systems, for example. They are electrically powered.
How does Boeing name their planes, such as Boeing 747? Why…
