Dreamliner 3 to fly around March 14; BCA Chief Talks

Sources have told me that ZA003 should fly (penciled in) around March 14th and Dreamliner 4 should return to the skies within the next one week after installation of more flight test equipment. Meanwhile the 787 test fleet is still racking up the hours with yesterday's test flights pushing the total test flight hours to over 225. Dreamliner 1 go to as fast as 0.96M at 33,000 feet in a test flight conducted on March 3, 2010.

Seattle Times reporter Dominic Gates had a revealing interview with Boeing Commercial Airplane group head Jim Albaugh.

Here's the extended interview:


In it he says Boeing prefers to build its commercial airplanes in the Puget Sound region of Washington State but only if they can get labor peace from IAM and SPEEA. The prospects of labor unrest is what motivated Boeing to locate the second line to Charleston, SC. Also very revealing is that Boeing will now dial down the 787 business model for future aircraft programs and not outsource as much work as they did for the 787. This will include the design, testing and production of the wings. Boeing will return more of the engineering in house for parts of the aircraft such as flight controls, composite fuselage and the wings. The outsourcing was driven more by business decision making rather than engineers making those decisions.

You can read the entire article below:

Dominic Gates' Interview with James Albaugh