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Thursday, August 2, 2012
Some Guys Have All the Luck
"Wired Test-Drives Boeing's New 787 Dreamliner"
Put the better part of four years of your life into it, and never even get to see one, touch one, or sit inside one. But be a reporter for a tech magazine and you get to take the yoke during a test flight... Sounds like I made a wrong career choice somewhere along the line.
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My former manager at Boeing wound up being the Flight Test Manager for the #3 test aircraft, and a couple of the guys who took other jobs offered as we were all getting laid-off wound up being involved as various flight test Technicians.
ReplyDeleteMan....have *I* got some stories to tell about the 787!
Back in '91 some marketing guys from Boeing came to us to produce a demo that would show their Engineers just how to do the new Process-Workflow integration thing. Never found out how that turned-out...
ReplyDeleteBut given that it's "Wired," isn't there a fear they'll put it in a left-wing spiral and crash?
I couldn't tell you if the process worked. I know the 787 program took much longer than they wanted - don't they always? I think we were planning for first flight in March of '06 when the program started, but it was in late '09 before it flew. I don't recall who it was that said, "faster, cheaper, better - choose any two".
DeleteBoeing seems to do about one airplane design per decade. There was more delay than usual between the 777 and the 787, with the 777 going into service in 1995 and the 787 in 2011 - but figure the 9/11 induced aviation recession added maybe three years in there. Despite the rapid progress of all things technical, the regulatory burdens increase faster than the technical side.
I still have my "Boeing 7E7" poster, prior to it being renamed. I'll have to keep that!
ReplyDeleteCool! I think there's still one or two in conference rooms around the place. I have two 7E7 coffee mugs: large, insulated, thin stainless shell. Never held coffee (I think...).
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