LyrArc Article Gist
A manufacturing defect led to an oil leak and and explosive engine failure for a Qantas Airbus A380 .

LyrArc Article Gist
Production delays, outsourcing issues and other problems are now hurting Boeing with cancellation of orders as airlines with lower profits in today's economic uncertainty are unable to take advantage of the new fuel efficient 787's in timely manner. Quantas first placed its order for upto 115 Dreamliners in 2005, and it hoped to reduce fuel costs with the 20% more fuel efficient Dreamliners than its 767 planes, which it hoped to retire. 28 Dreamliners were to be delivered by the end of 2011. This never happened as Boeing ran into production problems and only 17 were delivered to all airlines by September 2011. With the global economic uncertainty and slowdown Quantas is predicting a 90% drop in pretax profits for the fiscal year ending in June 2012 to A$50 million. With the situation changed Quantas decided to change the order by cancelling the orders for the larger 787-9 Dreamliner and keep the order for the 15 smaller 787-8 jets to save $8.5 billion. This follows a change made by China Eastern Airlines to cancel orders for 24 787s and buy smaller single aisle 737s for domestic flights. As a result Boeing's total orders stand at 824 in mid 2012, with only 7 new orders since 2007. Boeing says it needs to sell at least 1100 Dreamliners for the 787 program to be profitable. Its own forecast is for sales of an additional 2700 small twin aisle jets like the 787 between 2012 and 2031, with Boeing getting half of the market. The larger longer range 787-9 model will start delivery in 2014 and another version for more capacity on shorter routes the 787-10 is being discussed. Both programs Boeing's 787 Dreamliner and the competing Airbus A-350 program have suffered a series of production problems, outsourcing issues and delays in recent years. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Boeing takes a$1 billion charge for Dreamliner delays.

LyrArc Article Gist
China's C919 built by Comac is China's versionof the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 planes. China will need 6000 such jets by 2041 as passenger air travel doubles from today's levels. Air travel has recovered in China to prepandemic levels.Comac was formed out of the military as a company to make civilian aircraft with subsidies larger than estimated $70 billion. The first flight of the C919 took place from Beijing to Shanghai this week. It has a range of 3500 miles and seats 192 passengers. 

LyrArc Article Gist
Reporting for this highly informative article on wind energy development in Brazil was done with a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. Forero gives a detailed account of the setup of about 400 huge wind turbines larger than the size of a Airbus 380 in a windy area of Bahia state by a Brazilian company Renova Energia. It is an area that experts say is nearly perfect for the steady wind needed. Brazil has increased its wind generation capacity to 3% of its energy generation in 3 years since the first auction for companies seeking to build wind farms. By 2021 energy planners in Brazil see this going up to 10% of its energy generating capacity. New limits on the generation of hydropower is shifting the focus to speeding up the development of wind energy by the government of Dilma Roussef. State owned banks provide loans to companies like Renova Energia. New technology from French, Dutch, and Spanish companies with advanced sensors that shift the position of blades to adapt to wind conditions, the size of windmills of over 400 feet, and 1.6 megawatt turbines, make wind energy a realistic option for Brazil's expanding energy needs growing at 5% a year. French energy company Alsthom has a plant outside Salvador, the capital of Bahia state, to manufacture windmill components. This helps meet Brazilian government requirements for a certain percentage of local manufacuring of components....

LyrArc Article Gist
Efforts to achieve cost reduction on the Boeing Dreamliner and improve profitability. If Boeing used unit cost accounting or the difference between current sales and costs for each product delivered, the commercial jet division would show a loss of $69 million for the first 9 months of 2013.

LyrArc Article Gist
Boeing's desision to find a replacement for the 737 will be an important test for it to pass to build on its lead over Airbus in fuel efficient airplanes.

LyrArc Article Gist
Boeing makes the decision to make the next version of the Dreamliner, the 787-10, exclusively at its plant in the North Charleston area of S. Carolina. This is a non-union facility. Larry Loftis, Boeing's vice president and general manager of the 787 program, says the decision was made because it is not practical to ship by air the midbody section of the new plane which is 114 feet long, 10 feet longer than the 787-9. It would not fit into the modified 747 aircraft used to ship jet parts from one manufacturing facility to another. Currently this midbodysection is assembled in S. Carolina from pieces shipped by air from Italian and Japanese plants. Then flown to Everett, Washington or a S. Carolina assembly line for the final steps in the manufacturing process. Reliability and quality issues for the Dreamliner, and cost, are also better addressed by reducing shipment from one manufacturing facility to another. The decision to build this non-union plant in 2009 created strains with the labor unions. The 787-10 is 224 feet long, carries 320 passengers, one third more than the 787-8 and 15% more than the 787-9. It has a list price of 289 million. Boeing has 132 orders from airlines and lessors for this new version....

LyrArc Article Gist
Daniel Howes of the Detroit News thinks there are cultural clashes inherent in a threeway Fiat-Opel-Chrysler combination. His view is that Fiat may be biting into more than it can handle, considering the failure of the GM-Fiat alliance, and the Daimler- Chrysler combination. And the Germans at Opel are not happy with the way they see GM has treated them, so how would it help for Fiat to come into the picture? The Germans love the Italians, says one German Howe talked to, but don't respect them. And the Italians he says, respect the Germans but don't love them. Howe refers to the Renault-Nissan combination as successful, but one that took years to build to deliver commonly engineered cars. But the car industry has been poorly run, without vision and with complacent management, unwilling to try new things and recreate and renew. In other industries efforts are made to build transnational combinations with differing degrees of success. Take the work of the French, Germans and the Spanish in Airbus, in overcoming different cultural factors and pulling together to learn from each other, when given good leaders, on the Airbus 380 project. See the link to this. On Fiat's Marchionne's behalf it could be said that this is a new Fiat, run by a younger generation of Italians, who have a lot of youthful energies and freedom to innovate and improvise. Marchionne himself is more Canadian and European, places where he has spent most of his life, than Italian. And he has take a decidedly different view of things from what the old view holds as being Italian, in building the new Fiat he has done things very differently. In fact there may be less of a country view here, than a management culture view. All nationalities aspire to a good management culture of innovation, and freedom to improvise and respect for one's ideas and thinking, good places to work in. People of all nationalities, Italian, German and American, for the first time, especially the younger people, may see that the one thing they value most and share is the desire to start fresh and take initiative, improvise and work together to do the impossible. The common enemy of Germans, Italians, Americans,French, and other nationalities, may be simply the artheroschelorisis of complacent management, that freezes initiative, does not delegate more responsibility to the young and give the freedom to try new things, bureacratizes the corporation into rigid hierarchies that lack speed, and take no risks to achieve the impossible. See the link to Marchionne and Fiat's transformation. Which is why old prejudices like the one Howe states from one German he talks to, that the Italians "will steal the milk out of the coffee," may be just that - prejudice from another period, that is best left behind to build something new that has no nationality to it. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Its generally known that US airlines except for Southwest fly older planes but the extent to which this has been going on may not be gauged especially when compared to the foreign airlines. Because of bankruptcies and reducing the number of seats available by shrinking their fleets to keep prices at levels that sustain their margins, airlines are not ordering new planes and using the existing planes. The average age of the big jets in US airlines is now 12.2 years according to Airline Monitor. Boeing has a huge backlog of orders for its new planes but its mostly from foreign airlines. Only 43 of 710 Boeing 787 Dreamliners are going to domestic airlines, 25 to Continental and 18 to Northwest. And none of the 165 giant Airbus A380's are going to US carriers. These numbers are amazing because they suggest the new airplanes more comfortable more fuel efficient with more space and better air quality are just bypassing the US domestic routes. Quite amazing. Of the airlines Northwest has 109 of the oldest jetliners in the industry with an average age of 35 years. And worse still they could remain in service for another 5 years as there are no plans to replace them. Airline cleaning is not as frequent as before because of cost cutting and the dirt and grime, the conditions of the lavatory, all show their age and passengers can tell the difference. The seating is cramped and one passenger described a Northwest plane seating as feeling like being in a tuna can. And the airlines in the US are using these planes for longer routes with more chance of mechanical bfailures leading to more flight delays which are a huge problem this year especially into and out of the New York area. American flies a fleet of 300 older MD-80's which actually cost more to operate because they are gas guzzlers compared to the newer planes. Credit Sights estimates that this will continue for another 5 years because airlines are trying to save a cash cushion for leaner times, payoff debt and strengthen their balance sheets, and shareholders want some of the money returned to them. US Airlines had cash of about $28 billion as of June 30, 2007 but this is not enough. J.D. Poer and Associates estimates that US airlines need to spend $280 billion over the next 20 years to replace the aging planes. Meantime discount airlines in Europe are ordering new planes and Asian airlines have big orders. Air Berlin has about 85 737's on order and Wizz Air of Hugary ordered 50 Airbus A320's. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Boeing's alliance with Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China (Comac).

LyrArc Article Gist
Ostrower and Cameron point out that Dennis Muilenburg, the new CEO of Boeing, is first and foremost a engineer. He comes from a different background than former CEO Jim McNerney. McNerney graduated from Yale University, and followed a path of consulting with McKinsey, work at P&G, moved to General Electric where he worked under Jack Welch for many years, before the position at Boeing. This was a path for many CEO's at the time. As the U.S. returns back to its manufacturing and technological roots and with the manufacturing and technical problems at Boeing and Airbus, Muilenburg brings the right focus to meet future challenges. Muilenburg graduated from Iowa State University with a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering, a master's degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the University of Washington He joined Boeing as an engineering intern in 1985, and is at Boeing since 1985. Since Dec. 2013 Muilenburg was president and COO, leading Boeing's effort to use automation to cut costs of developing and building commercial jets. Before that job he headed Boeing Defense, Space and Security, where he is credited with improving the operating margin from 9% in 2009 to 10.8% in 2013. He cut costs and closed facilities as the division share of Boeing revenue declined from about 50% in 2009 to about 34% in 2014 following defense spending cuts, but did this while maintaining higher research spending to drive efficiency improvements, say analysts. At Boeing Muilenburg's first 14 years were spent designing jets and military systems, some for contracts such as the advanced fighter jet program which Boeing lost to Lockheed, before moving to Washington D.C. for a new unit selling air traffic management services. He says the move was a period of personal growth for him more than any other period in his career. Muilenburg enjoys cycling, and puts in about 120 miles per week around Chicago...

LyrArc Article Gist
The work of innovation teams that help reduce lost production time and make production more efficient on Boeing's 737 production lines in Renton, Washington. There are 1300 improvement teams at Boeing for commerical jet production. Examples range from conventional improvements such as remapping production arrangements to unconventional ones like the use of hay loaders to put seats on passenger planes. The work requires highly motivated production engineers and Boeing has a long tradition of this. Boeing has increased 737 jet production to 35 a month from 31.5 with the help of such improvements. The goal is to make 42 planes a month by 2014, and 60 by 2017 when the 737 MAX goes into production. Boeing has a large backlog of orders- 3,700 jets of which 2,300 are 737s.

LyrArc Article Gist
The engineering changes in the design of the 787 Boeing Dreamliner provide an experience in humidity levels, altitude levels, turbulence, and roominess that is not dramaically different but enough to provide a noticeably better experience. Nobumi Matsuda, who runs an eye clinic in Japan and is studying the eye health of pilots, says he expected more, that humidity levels were not enough. Boeing used the construction of the body of the jet using super strong plastics instead of aluminium, to create a small increase in humidity levels. The humidity level inside the Dreamlier is 10-15% compared to 4-7% in other airplanes. By pressurizing the cabin to lower altitudes there is a 6% increase in oxygen absorbed at the 6000 feet level at which it is set than the 8000 feet level, according to Boeing. Michael Grepo, a computer systems expert taking the Tokyo to Frankfurt flight on ANA, says he experienced an improvement in breathing, dryness of the nose and contact lens, but it was not a huge difference. Thorsten Hoffmann, a German sales executive says he did not notice till he got off the flight, when he realized that he felt good, had slept better. Othe changes are big overhead bins. The large windows are supposed to reduce motion sickness and provide great views on takeoff and landing. Boeing says "while it can be argued that the passenger comfort improvements are incremetal, the combination of so many improvements in one airplane is revolutionary in our opinion." At the customer level these are proving less revolutinary and more of a subtle type that add up to a noticeable improvement. Boeing now has on its hands a remarkable sales success, with 870 Dreamliners ordered by 59 of the world's airlines. A big factor from the airlines point of view is high fuel prices. The 787 is 20% more fuel efficient than the comparable size Boeing 767....