787 First Flight

[coppertales]

Wing flex is nothing new.  The early model B-52s would flex 19 feet, from top to bottom of the flex, where the later models, the G and H, would only flex 17 feet.  The 777 has alot of wing flex too.  When they take off you can see both wing tips over the top of the fuselage.  The 787 sure is a pretty airplane....chris3

[Fly320s]

Flexing is better than snapping. :)

[Gewehr98]

Hank,

The Sonic Cruiser was never intended to be supersonic, but would approach Mach .98 cruise.  Not supersonic, but most definitely sonic in the airspeed scheme of things compared to slower subsonic airframes.

As for Six Sigma, I defy one to find a current manufacturing company that's not using that particular quality concept in some way, shape, or form.  They may not call it that, but between that and 5S, it's out there.

Look at the dihedral created by the 787's wings in the head-on view below - very stable:

[roo_ster]

G98:

The problem with the 6 Sigma Zealots is not the application of 6s to manufacturing & engineering processes.  It is the insistence that everyone down to secretaries get 6s certified so the aforementioned admin can spend time supposedly using 6s tools to do...whatever to her performance as an admin.

It is also the dishonesty of the proponents who will not admit that 6s includes an overhead cost in time/money/etc. and that the overhead hit is not worth incurring for some projects.  This is not solely the sin of the 6s cowboys, but of all process folk who think their process regimen is The Answer.  For them, there is no software project, down to my shell scripts, that would not benefit from and would not be overburdened by their One Chosen Process*.

For instance, a job shop will not experience near the lift from the imposition of 6s processes & overhead as an assembly line.   My shell scripts do just fine without being CMMI level 5 code*.

FTR, I was implementing 6s practices before my company quaffed the 6s kool-aid.  I revamped processes, minimized error, and performed all sorts of analysis in support of customers and to figure out how to do my job better.  I used all sorts of tool 6s calls out, but I just called it "common sense" and "doing my job."



* Funny thing is, once you get that sort of process in place, sometimes gov't will specifically state in the RFP or other docs that they are not willing to pay for that sort of process overhead.  Laughed my backside off when i saw that the first time.

[Sergeant Bob]

Ex USAF maint guy here,  was showin the video to a buddy of mine here at college I was commenting on the amount of wingsweep, said it looked like a lot more than the BUFFs have  (he lived in Shreveport-Bossier, so he saw them flying all the time)

Me too! Crew Chief, SAC Trained Killer, BUFF's And KC135A's "Peace is our Profession, War is just a Hobby"  

[HankB]

The Sonic Cruiser was never intended to be supersonic, but would approach Mach .98 cruise.

Which is of course why I wrote it was subsonic - flying just under the speed of sound. But it was a very interesting design - could have made quite a name for Boeing. But as far as the airlines are concerned, COST isn't the main thing, it's the ONLY thing. And Boeing determined that tweaking an aircraft with a more conventional layout was a better path to giving the customers what they wanted.

As for Six Sigma, I'll state for the record that Six Sigma methodology does have it's place.

But when the Six Sigma High Priest decrees that it SHALL be used across ALL FUNCTIONS of the company . . . bureaucratic paperwork increases, productivity declines, innovation slows, and mayhem ensues.

[Hawkmoon]

And now Boeing has opened a second 787 assembly line in South Carolina to take advantage of the cheaper labor and more favorable labor climate there, as opposed to Everett.

Boeing has also had a satellite engineering office in Russia for several years. I'm conceptually in favor of improving our relations with Russia, but I have to question the wisdom of hiring Russian engineers (in Russia) to design what's supposed to be THIS country's bread-n-butter commercial aircraft for the next decade or three.

[AJ Dual]

G98:

The problem with the 6 Sigma Zealots is not the application of 6s to manufacturing & engineering processes.  It is the insistence that everyone down to secretaries get 6s certified so the aforementioned admin can spend time supposedly using 6s tools to do...whatever to her performance as an admin.

This.

I've turned down I.T./I.S. work repeatedly at G.E. who has a big presence in and around the Milwaukee area because I don't want to deal with the 6 Sigma BS in the front-end office environment where it's little more than a dog and pony show.  And that's from someone who now works full-time in the Aerospace/Defense QA side of things.

For actually designing and building an airplane or critical precision and/or complex components, 6 Sigma makes sense, people who use 6 Sigma to create a series of meetings to define the scope of the other meetings which will choose the participants of the meeting, and it had all better be documented properly...

I'll hang myself in front of my children before I do that.

[RocketMan]

The 777 has alot of wing flex too.

I saw that on a flight to Japan some years ago.  Very cool looking.  Another engineer that was traveling with me, already a white knuckle flyer, was not impressed.

[Gewehr98]

Retiring from Stan/Eval into the precision machining and quality world, I'll have to state I'm a Six Sigma Kool-Aid drinker.  Machining components down to 2-tenths tolerances, you'll have a hard time dissuading me of the concept.  It's not new, nor is Kanban, just-in-time, lean manufacturing, or 5S, but since we cannot use the term "common sense" any longer these days...  hell, I've got a sign over my office door labeled Quality Enforcement Center! If I'm not pissing off my CAD engineer with Engineering Change Requests for screwed up drawings, I feel my day went unfulfilled.  

Would I try to apply it evenly across the board for all business functions?  Hell no.  Again, that damned "common sense" thing keeps cropping up, don't it?  

I can see it, however, at Boeing, or Raytheon/L3Com Greenville (one of my old stomping grounds), or Lockheed on their big shop floors, no doubt about it.

[Tallpine]

bureaucratic paperwork increases, productivity declines, innovation slows, and mayhem ensues

And the general manager gets a raise!   

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

The 787 looks disproportionate to me.  Wings are too long and slender for such a big fat fuselage.

I hope it works out well for Boeing, though.  Hope they make bajillions of dollars on the thing.