Wednesday, September 9, 2009

787 production continuing

Well after a restful (somewhat) Labor Day weekend here's some 787 news. Production is continuing on production standard aircraft and now there is more room in 40-26 to build those production aircraft. ZA004 is due to move out soon if it has been moved out already from the final assembly line to hangar space that Boeing has leased from ATS at Paine Field. ATS is Aviation Technical Services and does heavy checks and other maintenance services to airlines and cargo operators. I think Boeing would put two of the 787s in the ATS hangars in order to perform the side of body fix without effecting current production of the 787. ZA006 should be moving out later this week either to the flight line or to another hangar spot (not sure if it would be a Boeing or ATS hangar). Also of note is that some of the aircraft do not have their engines on. This is to make the installation of the modification easier though the engines are still on ZA002 and ZA004, they were not on ZA005 and ZA006.

This would leave Boeing with three 787 in production at their final assembly line in Everett: ZA100 (LN7) in position 3, ZA101 (LN8) in position 2 and ZA102 (LN9) in position 1. Some parts for ZA104 (LN10) such as the wings and tail section have already arrived but when all the parts are delivered, that airplane will be quickly moved into position 1.

Boeing's LCFs have been busy conducting flights across the supply chain. Now some of these flight could be training flights and/or repositioning of shipping fixtures but undoubtedly there is also some movement of the fuselage sections between suppliers in Europe and Japan and GA in Charleston, SC.

2 comments:

dynamicsguy said...

When ZA005 was painted Boeing said that the GEnx engines were not on the airfame because they had been returned to GE for improvements to be incorporated. This may still be the reason for the missing engines, rather than to make the modification easier.

Uresh said...

Tim,
Your statement is true but a source has told me that it makes sense for Boeing to leave them off until after the fix is installed. They don't want the wings to carry a load while installing the fix between the wing box and the center section wing box. I think that's why LN 6 doesn't have it's engines on.