Dreamliner Flight

Hopefully the start of a new era in airliner technology.

Im wondering what all the noise is about. Is there something revolutionary about this bus? The laminar nacelles are only a small percentage more efficient.

I guess the target market for this plane is the medium to long distance inter state and short intercontinental market? When I compare it to the huge AIrbus I wonder whether AIrbus hasnt put all its buttons into capturing a market that isnt as busy as they think.(Or did Boeing miss the boat entirely?)

There are a lot of cool new technologies on this plane. I'm not saying this is something for the market to get excited about, as much as I'm geeking out about a plane I like.

They did a lot with the acoustics of the plane, and the specs on the engine (options) were pretty top class.

I was out in Everett back in 2007, when they did the press roll-out. Very cool.

T
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still, it seems like such a long time for developing a plane that was essentially supposed to be computer drawn from concept to as built.
Whats the passenger load on this one?
I suppose all the hub bub was about how fuel efficient this thing is. what with the "Smooth wings" and laminar nacelles. Bigass engines though. Im sure they could do a better Bernoulli analysis for the shape of the nacelles. I see them shaped more like the neck on an old coke bottle to really beef up the laminar flow. Or else, try to reinvent an old trick where the engines were fully tucked into the wing. and so the wings were wider. Itd look more like a flying saucer than a plane.

Yeah, I guess I don't know what all the hubbub is about either.

Gains in efficiency and reduced noise seem nominal to me.

Actually I am going to be uncomfortable flying in the new carbon composite material. I have seen a bird strike that showed no damage on the outside but the structure was barely capable of supporting its own weight by the time it landed.

It's pretty obvious to me that all the hubbub is about the increased humidity in the aircraft, I can think of very few benefits of airline travel that equal that.

Thats accomplished by recirculating the water from the restrooms into the atmosphere. AND theyve got a BIG CHUNK filter .

Here's a thread I started on it back in '07 - not a popular thread, but with an interesting article (to me) quoted -

http://able2know.org/topic/103419-1

If I'm not mistaken Boeing pioneereed all digital design with the 777 in the early 1990s. Many saving there. In the 1960s Boeing built a full scale mockup of the 747 just to verify the compatibility & layout of plumbing, wiring and mechanical linkages.

I'm not sure what you find so odd about the nacelle design. It looks like a scaled up version of the very efficient design now in the much modified 737s. The large inlet diameter merely reflects the engine power. Most folks don't realize it but modern fanjet engines like those on the 787 are really just ducted turboprop engines. The bypass ratio (ratio of mass flow of air through the fan annulus surrounding the hot core section of the engine to the mass flow through the core combustion chamber is well above 12:1 -- that's about like the T-56 turboprop engines on the C-130.

There's a selection of photos of the initial test flight readily finadable on Google. Some impressions;
-- very flexible wings: note the dihedral in flight vs that on the ground.
-- some washout in the wing aoa near the tips and some extensive vortex reduction treatment at the wingtips.
-- engines located fairly close to the wing root and rudder size reduced accordingly.

Mostle to me it looks like a scaled up 737.

Boeing aimed at a very fuel efficient aircraft that can be scaled up for longer range or higher capacity variants. Beyond that they stuck with contemporary basic size/layout patterns. Airbus aimed at redefining the market with significant size increases, but paid for it with higher operating cost (structural efficiency decreases with increasing size - that means more weight and fuel consumption). Which company made the better choice? We shall see....

Boeing has had some very nasty surprises re its "revolutionary manufacturing process", lets hope that this does not continue with its "revolutionary structural material".

So they got the thing off of the ground, that is good. Now we see what happens when they push this bird. Hopefully some bird strikes will be included.

Does anyone know if they now have an easier way to examine these new materials apart from ultra sound and xray because obviously that is not going to be done often enough to find in-flight damage such as a walk around aluminium did in the old days.

Glad fer your input. Im just saying that the features they present on this bus arent that "world shaking" (When it all comes down to the mat, everything is in the marketing neh?).
I was viewing the nacelle design and its barely an increase in laminar flow that translates to some big energy savings. But, I suppose that all these little effects are Additive and the overall effects, when we add up the energy savings from the nacelles, wings, body shape, smooth skin etc we achieve a 20% or better saving).

We discussed the Airbus v Boeing entries into the near term future markets . It was last year and there was a heavy vote in favor of Airbuses" MEGABUS v Boieng' dreamliner.

I think that, with all the advances we see in technology that e are presented almost daily, Im just somewhat let down that both Airbus and Boeing have only "WOWED" us with fuel savings and cattle pens. I want a super plane that looks like a total departure from our existing designs.

I agree with your observations and sympathize with your desire for more innovation.

I think the present strategies of Airbus and Boeing can be better understood in the contect of history. In the old old days when the US had at least four major producers of commercial aircraft (Boeing, Lockheed, Douglas, and Convair) Boeing won the struggle through a combination of innovation, artful exploitation of parallel developments in their Air Force bomber/tanker contracts (particularly in the structural design of big wings), and good luck. It all came together with the Boeing 707 (itself a knockoff of the KC-135 tanker), which handily beat out the DC-8 and Convair 880. French and British aircraft manufacturers were the equals of their U.S. counterparts in innovation and design, but couldn't match production capacity and scale.

Now in a mature market dominated by two producers, each the consolidated product of multiple regional competitors, the economic stakes are higher and as a result the design strategies more conservative and closely focused on the economics of operation. The current situation in the airline industry worldwide only adds to all this.

Airbus won its current competitive position through early adoption of fly-by-wire flight control systems which replaced the conventional mechanical/hydraulic systems and more extensive use of light weight carbon filament structural components. The electrical flight control systems in particular provided many subsequent advantages in that with modern. low-cost, redundant computer systems the flight controls could be automatically programmed to adjust gains & settings for existing flight conditions on a continuous basis. This offered many design advantages in the stability vs controllability conundrum which usually permitted only a narrow range of often expensive (and heavy) aerodynamic and structural solutions.

Boeing was behind in these areas until the early 1990s, but has since caught up. Now both companies are caught in a squeeze of comparable products and a lack of product differentiation. I suspect that Airbus' decision to change the game with double deck, high capacity aircraft was made with this in mind. I also think that Boeing made the correct strategic decision to pursue a different course, focusing on efficiency and reliability. Both companies have interesrtingly run into problems associated with decentralized component manufacturing and (in some cases) design.

Both competing models will use modern computer-driven flight control & stability systems and extensive light weight filament structural components. The Boeing model has the potential to offer marginal advantages due to its smaller size - structural efficiency decreases with scale - and, depending on how well they did their job this may be decisive. The economice work in a similar way - a smaller, fuller aircraft makes more money than a bigger emptier one, even if it is less efficient.

The new innovations have their problems as well. Automatic flight control systems have often unanticipated side effects, as I suspect was the case with the loss of the Air France flight over the South Atlantic a few months ago. The carbon filament structures have been around for a couple of decades now and an initial series of problems associated with their non-isotropic strength properties has been solved, but others, particularly involving ageing and inspection, probably remain.