Finally, She Flew

Finally, the Dreamliner flew, a little late, but it flew. On December 15th 2009 the B787 Dreamliner had its first flight. The aircraft is almost an all composites aircraft and Boeing had design issues and workload issues, the B747-8 the latest variant of the venerable B747 has still to fly.

Boeing had to delay the first flight 6 times in the last 2 years until they got the right fix. Airlines were unhappy about the delays, but then the Recession hit and it was not all that bad, considering there were discussions about compensations.

The B787 has leading edge technologies (click here for details) incorporated in the design. However, the most important feature is the composite content of the aircraft, which has caused some of the delays. An almost all composite aircraft poses problems in maintainability and repairabilty of the structure. This requires development of new repairs and specialised training.

The coming few months of flight testing will be prove the new technologies and it should be very interesting .

Finally, she flew, Boeing has always been known to design beautiful airplanes and the Dreamliner follows this tradition very sleek lines and performance and handling that matches it.