Boeing Co.’s latest delay means the 787 Dreamliner will take almost as long to develop as the planemaker’s original model that ushered the U.S. into the Jet Age more than a half-century ago.
The schedule Boeing announced yesterday would start 787 shipments to airlines in 2010, almost six years after the first order. That’s about two years more than the average for other Boeing planes and rivals the six years and two months spent on the 707 in the 1950s. That aircraft, which started out as the Dash 80, was the forerunner of the more than 16,000 commercial jets the company has built since.
Punsters have had their way with the 787 Dreamliner amid the four delays since October 2007: It’s the “7-Late-7” and the “Lateliner” in reports by Rob Stallard, an analyst in New York with Macquarie Research Equities. Newspapers including London’s Daily Telegraph quipped about the Dreamliner turning into a nightmare. Chicago-based Boeing has lost 61 percent of its market value since the first delay.
“The 787 has seriously undermined the confidence that all stakeholders previously had in Boeing,” Stallard said in an e- mail interview. “We think it will take a very long time to overcome the erosion to goodwill that has occurred.”
Boeing fell $1.07, or 2.7 percent, to $39.20 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.
‘Phenomenal Leap’
The 787 remains Boeing’s most successful new sales program based on orders and dollar value, with 910 on the books valued at $157 billion. Boeing has been counting on the jet to help it win back the position of world’s largest commercial-plane maker, which it lost to Toulouse, France-based Airbus SAS in 2003.
The new model will be the first commercial aircraft to be built mainly of lightweight composites, rather than aluminum, to increase fuel efficiency and help airline clients cut costs. The new materials further complicated an assembly process that depends on vendors to build large sections of the 787, which are then shipped to Boeing for final assembly in Everett, Washington.
The Dreamliner “will be a phenomenal leap, but not without its problems,” said spokeswoman Liz Verdier in Seattle, where Boeing has built aircraft for almost a century.
The Dash 80 made its first flight from Renton Field, south of Seattle, just two months after it rolled from the factory in 1954. The Dreamliner, in contrast, now isn’t expected to have its first test flight until next year’s second quarter, almost two years after it was unveiled to the public. The plane was supposed to have been delivered in May of this year to Japan’s All Nippon Airways Co., the inaugural customer.
Airbus Delays
Airbus has also suffered program delays, with its 525-seat A380 needing almost seven years before its first delivery last year. The superjumbo jet completed a test flight just three months after its roll-out, however, and encountered setbacks only once it entered production. The unit of European Aeronautic, Defence & Space Co. also had to redesign its A350, Airbus’s answer to the 787, pushing deliveries back to 2013 from as early as 2010.
“The Dreamliner delays are likely to be as bad as the A380, or as some people called it, the A-3-Turkey,” said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with aviation consulting firm Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia. “But it entered service successfully, and so will the 787.”
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