Three in a row, two in a week..

There is some movement in the A320neo engine market right now, it seems. P&W scored three "wins" in a row recently. After BOCA announced an order for 15 A320neo to be powered with the PW1100G-JM, this week both Tigerair and ANA selected the Geared Turbo Fan for 37 and 30 aircraft.
I would expect that we will see more decisions about A320neo engine options being taken this year as EIS is now less than 20 months away. The PW1100G-JM should gain certification this summer so that it will maybe have an advantage in customer confidence (and this is badly needed by P&W after the PW6000 disaster).
Right now the GTF has a slightly larger market share with 896 aircraft (866 shown here by pdxlight plus 30 by ANA) to be powered versus 827 to be powered by the LEAP-1A. But there are large campaigns waiting for a winner, like Lion Air (174 aircraft), American Airlines (130 aircraft) and easyjet (100 aircraft), so the picture can turn by any of these campaigns decided.

Media hype about B787 test flights

The recent media hype about the test flight(s) now allowed for narrowing the cause of the two battery incidents of the Japan Air Lines and ANA B787 is quite funny in one way. On the other side, it is a little bit sad to see that so many articles are out there in the (written) press and in the Internet and that people find it important to twitter from starting the engines from landing (God thanks!) safely again - as if now every minute the aircraft could come down because every battery could fail every minute. This coverage is not just a little bit exaggerated - it's a hype. The same people could easily comment every minute that an A380 that did not get the wing fix yet is still up in the air...
The problem for Boeing is not to keep the B787 in the air during the test flights - the problem is how to come out of the dilemma: how do they want to make FAA 1000% certain that the aircraft and the battery is safe without changing the design of the battery and surroundings or changing to another battery type. At the end there are just those two options, I guess. And then there are the "How long will it take..." questions:

• How long will that take to get the new design or a new battery?
• How long will it take to get hardware to put it into one of the test aircraft?
• And how long will it take to recertify the aircraft with that?
• How long will it take to ramp up production for the new hardware?
• How long will it take to incorporate the change into the 50 aircraft that are delivered?
• How long will it take to change the aircraft that are now ready for delivery but are waiting for the fix?
• How long and how many aircraft on the production line have to wait to get the new hardware?

I think that from those questions it gets immediately clear that Boeing has a serious problem in getting the B787 to customers waiting for the aircraft - it won't be just a few weeks that deliveries will restart.

B787 grounded...

It is not clear yet what the grounding by FAA and others means for the whole B787 program as nobody knows how long the grounding will last and what consequences will come out of the

Dreamliner ready to fly and "kill"

After getting FAA and EASA approval last week, yesterday also the Japanese Civil Aviation Bureau gave it's "thumbs up" for the B787-8. Launch customer All Nippon Airways can now go forward with it's plan to place the B787 into service.
After more than three long years of delays, the Dreamliner now becomes reality. And despite the first batch of aircraft will be overweight (one heard many different numbers) and the two competing engines obviously are in terms of SFC not where they should be, we can expect there now is an aircraft available that will bring economics never seen before.
The first international route ANA will fly with the B787 is Tokyo-Frankfurt.

New 787 delays?

Flightblogger today reports about possible new delivery delays of the 787 due to rework being done before delivering the aircraft to the customers.

As long as Boeing does not confirm that there is a new delay we have to talk about speculations – but so far, every time such a speculation came across there was at least some truth in it (just to sound polite…).

The article suggests that the first aircraft will still be delivered to ANA in mid February, but won’t be able to enter service without further modifications. I guess this is something the ANA management will not be happy with: they won’t take delivery of an aircraft without being able to take it with them – just makes no sense, even if we can assume that ANA will effectively get this aircraft for free.

But the exact timing of this first delivery does only have symbolic meaning anyway. (One of) the important question(s) is: when will Boeing be able to deliver the “Dreamliner” in numbers?

We would need more information about the specific problems and modifications that Boeing deals with. Jon Ostrower lists a few of them:

·        a flight deck window popping sound

·        cabin condensation issues

·        reworking passenger doors

·        workmanship issues on the aircraft's horizontal stabilizer (well-known problem)

·        changes to the Trent 1000 engine (Package B)

The pooping sound of the window should not be a big issue – proper insulation should care for that.

Cabin condensation seems to point to a problem with the air conditioning. That could mean everything: if they are lucky they just have to adjust the software – if they are unlucky, the humidifier are too small and have to be redesigned.

Reworking the passenger doors should not be the thing that holds up deliveries for months – reworking the stabilizers was probably more complicated, but is not a new problem and led to the latest (official) delivery slip – among the problems with the Trent engines.

So from what is being mentioned, a new slippage for months would not be explainable. The question is: which problems are not mentioned here?

I guess Boeing will soon have to give answers to the Flightblogger report – they should tell the public the whole story, they already lost too much credibility to just release the obvious…