Ever since I was a kid I’ve always enjoyed watching airplane takeoffs. The 787 has been of double interest to me in this respect. Technically this is as much a leap forward as the 707 and the 747 were – where they brought routine jet travel and the widebody long distance aircraft to the market, the introduction of the all composite airplane will revolutionize air travel just as much. So it’s with excitement I’ve been following the development of the project, agonized at the delays, and waited for the first flight with bated breath. At the same time, as someone in management for a long time, I can only shake my head at the weird ineptitude of Boeing’s senior management, who seemingly lost in a haze of powerpoint haven’t a clue as to what their engineering teams are up to. At times they’ve give press conferences making announcements saying a milestone was met only to retract them the very next day saying there was a large delay. They seem to have mostly lived in a world of wishful thinking, only to rudely awakened to the fact that their project is using a lot of brand new technology which is somewhat unpredictable, being brand new technology. This is on top of the disastrous attempt to get the suppliers to to do all of their integration work for them, which they might have guessed would have been problematic especially given the radical nature of the technology on the project. But after all that, the engineers produced a beautiful airplane, and it looks like it’s about to fly in the next few days, weather permitting!
Jon Ostrower’s nice FlightBlogger blog is carrying lots of coverage of the airplane. Here’s some video of it on its taxi runs (with rotation!) yesterday:
Videos Courtesy of Liz Matzelle
