the new Boeing 787s -- don't let them pass you by (in 2008)!

The Dreamliner looks gorgeous. I'm looking forward to it. Although I have to say that name is pretty lame. I prefer the simplicity of 787.

Thermo, on BA in Business class, every other seat faces backwards. I don't know of any other airline with backwards seats, though. Supposedly facing backwards is safer if you crash on the runway...

xpost: the 757 >>>>>>>> any other boeing aircraft in commercial use.

This plane is smaller than the 747.

The best Boeing is the 777, me thinks.

probably not.

Will the future of commercial air travel be point-to-point on medium-sized, highly efficient airplanes (let's hope so), or hub-to-hub on massive, economy-of-scale utilizing planes (let's hope not)?

The A380 is pretty efficient, as planes go, as well, however that efficiency does depend on them being fully loaded, that goes for all planes.

The 787 is Boeing's all new replacement for the 757/767 series of smaller long distance planes. In response to the efficiency games, Airbus has put out a spoiler plane in the form of the A350 derivative (90% new design though) of the A330. Basically it comes from two different views of where air travel is going.

The dreamliner is a point to point airliner, ideal for smaller loading from smaller airports, it could easily be the spring board for inter-continental budget airlines, if it is as efficient as claimed.

The A350 is less radical than the dreamliner, but still a very advanced aircraft with heavy use of composites and should have comparable fuel economies with the 787 mainly through cramming in a few extra seats.

The A380 is about maximising capacity on congested routes from congested airports, Europe-East Coast, Tokyo-Osaka, although it's also been taken by Airlines such as Emirates and Singapore who are locked into hubs in tiny nation states and need to maximise number of seats on planes. You better beleive that someone is going to cram 800 seats on one of these things for the Tokyo Osaka run.

If the A380 is a success then Boeing can always revive it's 747-800 stretched version of the 747.

They'll be space for both in the market as they are going after different niches.

here's hoping. the market is definitely there for that. north america -> asia will do outstandingly well.

Someone needs to be working on powering these planes on vegetable oil/ethanol blends.

lol

why not just stay on yr continent, then you can use the best ever form of transport: train.

Clearly the best advancement in international transport would be to build superfast elevators through the center of the Earth. Something like a pneumatic tube.

http://zapatopi.net/pneumatic/beachsub2.jpg

http://zapatopi.net/pneumatic/beachsub.jpg

http://www.uboatarchive.net/JtOpsCtr11.jpg
Craig keeps a close eye
http://www.uboatarchive.net/JtOpsCtr6.jpg
Jenny updates the big chart

its often said that safety occupies this top spot, but it seems to actually occupy maybe....10th place, priority-wise?

Pretty poorly

Have you ever seen a graphite hockey stick break?

Not really the same stuff. The design the composite to have the mechanical properties for the job.

JBR OTM re: smaller planes, especially in mid-size/small markets. 80% of my flights are on 50-seat regional jets or props, and another 15% are on DC-9s, which aren't really modern aircraft in any sense of the word. Only place I'll ever see these super-planes is across the tarmac while connecting at O'Hare.

Apparently the regional carriers have much less restrictive labor contracts than the majors, so their overhead is lower. The regionals are probably closer to what the future industry will look like.

I do a lot of inter-continental flying, because I live in a foreign country. So I get to fly on 777s all the time (for 13 hours).

What a half-billion dollar A380 gets you: http://gizmodo.com/5279529/inside-the-485+million-airbus-a380-flying-palace

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamliner-production-problems.html

Not great.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-looks-to-a-software-developer

not great.

Boeing Has So Many Grounded 737 Max Planes Waiting to Be Fixed They're Parking Them in the Employee Parking Lot

In a bit of good news, one company is interested in buying quite a few of them.

Boeing on Tuesday won its first order for 737 Max planes since the jets were grounded worldwide in March after two fatal crashes. The vote of confidence from British Airways’ parent sent shares of the manufacturer sharply higher.

International Consolidated Airlines Group, or IAG, signed a letter of intent at the Paris Air Show to order 200 Boeing 737 Max planes.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/18/british-airways-parent-places-first-new-order-for-boeing-737-max-since-grounding.html

For Seattle ilxors, you can view the parking lot in the jalopnik article from the south park bridge. It’s amazing, maybe 30 of them sitting along the river, iceland air and thai smile and turkish and so many others i don’t recognize

Boeing 737 MAX 8 Likely Grounded for Rest of 2019 After New Concerns Raised

Some of the language in that article is a maybe a little bit hyperbolic.

This is a bit more measured, Boeing still don't come out of it very well at all:

https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/faa-and-boeing-initially-disagreed-on-severity-of-catastrophic-737-max-software-glitch/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html

That’s a good read.

Although it doesn’t really offer any solutions- just a very well researched and well written description of the problem. I’m mildly suspicious of the expert graybeards from central casting that he quotes throughout the piece, because it all seems a little one-sided, but then again the Indonesian and Ethiopian crews that are still around to talk are apparently not allowed to.

Boeing pilots' messages on 737 MAX safety raise new questions

https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/john-barnett-on-why-he-wont-fly-on-a-boeing-787-dreamliner/

What is your own personal practice on flying Boeing aircraft now?

“When I worked on the 747, the 767, the 777 in Everett, those are beautiful planes. And the people there fully understood what it took to build a safe and airworthy aircraft. I hate to throw the entire label over the whole product line. But as far as the 787, I would change flights before I would fly a 787. I’ve told my family — please don’t fly a 787. Fly something else. Try to get a different ticket. I want the people to know what they are riding on.”

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a30470973/boeing-737-max-employees-emails/

I don’t want to read this. I’m just posting it here

"This airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.”

But the the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee provided excerpts of those messages to Bloomberg News that un-redacted the Indonesian carrier’s name.

“Now friggin Lion Air might need a sim to fly the MAX, and maybe because of their own stupidity. I’m scrambling trying to figure out how to unscrew this now! idiots,” one Boeing employee wrote in June 2017 text messages obtained by the company and released by the House committee.

In response, a Boeing colleague replied: “WHAT THE F%$&!!!! But their sister airline is already flying it!” That was an apparent reference to Malindo Air, the Malaysian-based carrier that was the first to fly the Max commercially.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-14/lion-air-idiots-sought-more-max-training-boeing-thwarted-it

is there anyway to check (in advance of booking) which type of aircraft will be used on your flight? would not fancy going on one of these for say, oooooh, about 10 years?

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/9/22165956/boeing-737-max-flight-brazil-gol-airlines

Gol Airlines told the publication it plans to use the 737 Max in regular service starting later this month, and passengers who don’t want to fly on the plane will be able to exchange their tickets.

all airlines need to do this imo

You can go to FlightAware.com and enter your flight # which will give you a lot of data about that flight; below the flight map you'll see a log of scheduled flights and what aircraft will be used, plus a record of what aircraft were used in previous flights.

Some airlines' websites, e.g. JetBlue's, tell you the aircraft used for each flight when you go there to do your booking. I wouldn't say they're accurate 100% of the time but I think they generally are.

Another 737 gone missing after taking off from jakarta

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-not-spirit-mis-installed-piece-that-blew-off-alaska-max-9-jet/

The fuselage panel that blew off an Alaska Airlines jet earlier this month was removed for repair then reinstalled improperly by Boeing mechanics on the Renton final assembly line, a person familiar with the details of the work told The Seattle Times.

If verified by the National Transportation Safety Board investigation, this would leave Boeing primarily at fault for the accident, rather than its supplier Spirit AeroSystems, which originally installed the panel into the 737 MAX 9 fuselage in Wichita, Kan.

That panel, a door plug used to seal a hole in the fuselage sometimes used to accommodate an emergency exit, blew out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 as it climbed out of Portland on Jan. 5. The hair-raising incident drew fresh and sharp criticism of Boeing’s quality control systems and safety culture, which has been under the microscope since two fatal 737 MAX crashes five years ago.

Last week, a different person — an anonymous whistleblower who appears to have access to Boeing’s manufacturing records of the work done assembling the specific Alaska Airlines jet that suffered the blowout — on an aviation website separately provided many additional details about how the door plug came to be removed and then mis-installed.

is there anyway to check (in advance of booking) which type of aircraft will be used on your flight? would not fancy going on one of these for say, oooooh, about 10 years?

KAYAK Lets Users Filter Out Boeing 737 Max 9 Flights After Door Blows Off Plane

oof

Nationalize Boeing

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/24/delta-air-lines-plane-nose-wheel-falls-off

More concerns as Alaska Airlines flight arrives at PDX gate with open cargo door
https://www.koin.com/news/alaska-airlines-safety-concerns-cargo-door-pictures-portland/

o_0

Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

It said the 62-year-old had died from a "self-inflicted" wound on 9 March and police were investigating.

Damn

Also this today https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2024/03/11/at-least-50-injured-on-latam-airlines-boeing-787-after-technical-problem-causes-sudden-drop-in-altitude/

Jon Oliver did a good piece on them last week, the gist of it is their only priority right now is shareholder value

I know nothing about financing, stocks, etc. But it seems to me that if I owned a business that I really cared about, I would never take it public.

Really good article that sums up Barnett's (the now dead whistleblower) complaints.

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

Hm another whistleblower has died.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dean-of-boeing-supplier-spirit-aerosystems-has-died/

o_O

those Prospect articles about Barnett are wild

I was going to say something about irony impairment by naming your rejected/not-rejected parts bin MRSA, but fuck this company
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-04-30-whistleblower-laws-protect-lawbreakers/

Sections 47 and 48 of a 787 Boeing Dreamliner fuselage consist of the back four rows of the plane’s passenger seating, bathrooms, meal prep area, flight attendant seating, and rear exit doors. “Not the kind of thing you could sneak out on the back of a pickup truck,” says Rob Turkewitz, an attorney who represents the estate of John Barnett, the whistleblower who was found dead last month the morning he’d been scheduled to finish a deposition in his whistleblower lawsuit against the company. And yet around 2015, someone caused a massive hunk of this fuselage to vanish from the Material Review Segregation Area (MRSA) of the Charleston, South Carolina, 787 assembly plant, without leaving any kind of paper trail. As near as Turkewitz and his former client have been able to figure, no one ever determined what became of the thing.

what in the fuck

so what, hypothetically, could you do with that if you had ill intent?

I think the point here was that 'losing track' of something like that and not even reporting it is a graphic illustration of how absurdly far Boeing was from compliance with federal regulatory requirements. Whether it was purposeful or accidental wouldn't even matter.

gotcha, jeez

crazy stuff

last company i worked for did tons of business for Boeing - we supplied them with antennas among other things. our company, and i wouldn't be surprised if it was the same with other suppliers, were more and more following the Boeing mentality. we had a locked room that had all the "scrap material" that couldn't be taken to the material shredder until everything was signed off on by quality assurance, the appropriate upper management, the customer, etc. so the fact Boeing had something like that disappear is absolutely wild.

straight up, the FAA doesn't fuck around, so at least i made sure everything i was doing was always by procedure.

for example, products we supplied airlines had to be assembled, painted, tested, etc. at certain approved temperatures and humidity. one year, the facility manager decided that to save some money they were going to hold off on repairing the AC system. flash forward to May/June and the AC hasn't been fixed and a heat wave is going through the area. the production area was hitting 95+ F and terrible humidity. it took program managers to get them to let them know we were violating government regulations to finally get them to fix the AC. but that's the kinda snakey shit i started seeing upper upper management were doing to save a buck/get their next promotion.

yep, and I bet that was x10 at Boeing

Cracks In KC-46 Pegasus Tankers Halt All Deliveries
https://www.twz.com/air/cracks-in-kc-46-pegusus-tankers-halt-all-deliveries

...compendium of Boeing failures continues at link

Something truly post-apocalyptic about seeing an A380 being scrapped... pic.twitter.com/kd4TZMyEwW

— Zaphod Beeblebrox (@Zaphod2042) April 17, 2025

The first, second, and so far only long-haul flights I ever took were on an Airbus A380. My enduring memory is of discovering that the headphone socket for the in-flight entertainment was in the handrest about an hour before landing on the return flight. For a while they were a really common sight in the skies over London because the major customer was Emirates, who bought a huge fleet of them seemingly so that lots of people could fly from London to Dubai.

I remember reading that they couldn't be converted into cargo planes because the top deck wasn't strong enough to carry pallets. If the deck was reinforced the aircraft wouldn't have enough engine power to take off, and in any case it would have been difficult to load the top deck. So unlike the Boeing 747 it didn't have an afterlife as a cargo plane. And the Boeing 777 could land at a much wider range of airports. The only two airports the A380 could land in Spain were Madrid and Tereul, a maintenance facility which isn't open to the public, whereas the 777 could land in Malaga etc.

I learn from the internet that Virgin Atlantic ordered six A380s in 2001, then waited and waited and waited until eventually cancelling their order in 2018 because fuel was just too expensive. They dodged a bullet there. I'm also reminded that during the COVID pandemic Singapore Airlines used one of their A380s as a pop-up restaurant:
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/singapore-pop-up-restaurant-sells-out-in-30-minutes-trnd/index.html

Customers bought a ticket to sit in a static A380 and have a (presumably freshly-cooked meal). There were also sightseeing "flights to nowhere" that took off and landed from the same runway, giving people the chance to see Antarctica / the Southern Lights / Hong Kong etc from the air without having to pass through international arrivals. Like in Dawn of the Dead, where the undead instinctively flocked to a shopping mall, because they were re-enacting their former lives.

Ten year old documentary on Boeing and the 787 suddenly relevant

Our journalism reveals the deeply-held safety concerns of current and former Boeing engineers, who in some cases fear to fly on the 787, the plane they build.

We uncover allegations of on-the-job drug use, quality control problems and poor workmanship.

We explore the roots of the battery problems that led to the plane’s grounding due to safety concerns for three months from January 2013.

For more on the investigation, visit http://www.aljazeera.com/boeing787

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os