Guy Norris Updates 787 Test Flight

Guy Norris of Aviation Week put out a great article describing the short term flight test program, particularly for ZA005 now that this aircraft has entered the test flight program. According to Guy, ZA005 will undertake an abbreviated version of the initial air worthiness testing including flutter testing and stability and control testing among other test points that will be examined with the GEnx-1B engines. This aircraft has essentially the same instrumentation that ZA001 has for it's testing earlier this year.

Guy also talks about the progress on increasing the fuel efficiency of the GEnx-1B engines and GE's desire to get the engines to spec with the PIP (product improvement package) 1 that would be delivered to customers around May of 2011. There are further improvements planned for the GEnx-1B to increase fuel efficiency even further but those improvements won't show up until 2012.

Guy Norris: GE-Powered 787 Enters Test Flight