What’s Going On With The Boeing 777X?!

what's going on with the Boeing 7 x the original boing 7 flew for the first time about 4 years after its launch and started flying passengers only one year after that but its replacement the trip 7 x was planned to enter service 7 years after its launch but it now looks like it will take over 12 years to get it up and running with passengers on board so what gives stay tuned in the 1980s Boeing developed a version of its jumbo jet called the 747 SP or special performance this model was basically a shortened version

of its early 747 models and the idea behind the SP was that Airlines could use it for really long non-stop routes with relatively few passengers something that their regular 747s just didn't have the range for the SP was well a interesting looking aircraft but it wasn't a big seller since it only really worked in this quite narrow Niche however Boeing felt that there was something worth exploring in this concept something that is today known as long and thin Roots but to make more of those types of roots available for even more customers Boeing needed a

more efficient jet they briefly considered offering an updated version of the same shorten 747 body and calling it the 747 ASB based on the newer 747400 but the air quickly told boing that they weren't interested in that at all instead they wanted boing to do what Airbus had done with the a300 this was to make a widebody airline there were just two engines making it big enough to serve the same role as the 747 SB and efficient enough to work in a wide variety of different routes that same jet would then also be able to

compete well with the mcdonal Douglas dc10 and the loed triar which would be great and that is what led to the development and the creation of the original iconic boing Tri 7 and the tri 7 x where did that one come from well just as the original Triple 7 family was meant to replace the 747 SPS and many of the tri Jets the tri 7 x was built to replace the bigger newer boing 747400 but that wasn't the only reason for it boing also had to respond to what Airbus were doing at the time and

that meant eventually trying to match the Airbus a 350 which Airbus launched in 2006 and what made things really acute was when Airbus in 2011 upgraded their larger model the Airbus A35 1,000 to give it some extra range that upgrade made that model more appealing to quite a lot of potential customers which immediately got boing's attention because with those modifications the AT3 51,000 actually had the potential to kill boing's 7 300 ER their biggest most recent and most popular Tri 7 variant so boing knew that they had to react and stretching the existing Triple 7

along with new engines and a new Wing seemed like the most logical thing to do now on a side note here I should point out that Airbus had originally also wanted to make the a350 by modifying the A330 in a similar Way by keeping its existing fuselage but the Airlines and lessers hated that idea since it just wasn't modern enough the A330 itself was a development of the a300 which dated all the way back to the 1970s so a completely new aircraft was instead made which turned into the gorgeous a350 that we see today but

in the case of the Triple 7 well that was a much newer design and the airline still really liked its cabin and other features so an update to this model actually did make a lot of sense but there was a problem here because that time period around 2011 and 2012 was really busy for boing the company had just announced the development of the 737 Max and at the same time the 787 had just entered service and faced quite a few issues including a couple of well publicized lithium battery fires on top of that boing were

also working on the newer version of the 787 the -10 meaning that they really had a lot of stuff going on already they did try to pce thems a bit but they couldn't really afford to wait too long either since Airbus aimed to introduce the A3 51,000 in 2017 Boeing didn't want its next version of the Triple 7 to enter service much later than that so they initially targeted 2019 or 2020 for a service entry the trip 7x was formally launched in September 2013 sporting Luft Hansa as the launch customer and Boeing would be offering

the airlines two different versions of this new jet to choose from the larger Tri 7-9 would take priority as the 747 replacement so it was planned to enter service first around 2020 and then the smaller trip 7-8 would compete against the Airbus A3 51,000 and be introduced a little bit later that -8 was actually a little bit smaller than the tri 7300 ER but Boeing also had to offer a newer alternative to the even smaller Tri 72 200 LR so with that in mind the tri -8 was designed to fit in between the two old

the triple 7s which also meant that it would be pretty close to its main Airbus rival in terms of design well like I said in the introduction the Triple 7 x was supposed to be a quicker project than an all new airliner something that Boeing basically just could whip together pretty fast it would first of all be equipped with more efficient engines and after getting offers from General Electric Bratton Whitney and Rolls Royce boing eventually selected General Electric and the g9x this was an absolute monster of a turbo fan and it was created as an

evolution of the ge90 which was already powering the 7300 ER the engine includes elements from the 787s genx with newer lighter materials and to give you an idea of just how massive this engine is the cing has a larger diameter than the fuselage of the 737 that I fly but the other really big change from the tri 7 to the 7 x was its wings here Boeing borrowed heavily from the development of the 787 and designed a thinner longer and much bendier composite wing with a higher aspect ratio this higher aspect ratio also meant the

development of perhaps the most famous feature of this plane its folding wing tips these folding parts are by the way much bigger than they look each one is actually 3 and 1 half M or just a over 11 ft long and together with the engines this really gives you an idea of just how enormous This Plane actually is now the purpose of those foldable wing tips is to allow the tri 7x to stay in the same gate category as the existing Triple 7 since the gate category is decided based on wingspan not fitting this feature

would have limited the airports that this plane could fly into due to taxiway restrictions and other things and it would have also increased the cost for the airline since using larger Gates would have also meant larger handling fees beyond that the new aircraft would also borrow some systems from the 787 which was relatively straightforward since the 787 had previously also borrowed a lot of system from the Legacy Tri 7 these similarities in systems and design meant that the tri 7 and the 787 already shared a type rating allowing Pilots to switch from one to the

other with only a simple difference training and that same process will now also cover the tri 7x the wings and the engines were obviously key to this plane's success but boing thought that the conservative fuselage design should make its development relatively straightforward especially compared to you know trying to start something from scratch that's why in 2013 boing thought that they would be quite conservative when they projected that the first re-engine and rewing tri 7x would fly in 2019 and then enter service in 20 that would mean a 7year estimate from program launch to service entry

which was actually 2 years more than the original clean sheet Tri 7 had taken but as it would later turn out this wasn't nearly enough so how could that be and what does this mean for Boeing Airbus and all the airlines who have already ordered the tri 7x well I'll tell you all about that after this have you ever found yourself caught of guard by unexpected challenges kind of like the way that Boeing did with the triple 7x well sometimes life can be really unpredictable throwing curve balls when we least expect them and that's why

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earlier the Airlines and lessers were already quite happy with the existing fuselage of the tri 7 and Boeing was obviously super happy that their existing Jigs and other production infrastructure could remain in use as well for the coming production of the Triple 7 x but just because it was almost the same it didn't mean that there weren't any changes in the design and production of this new plan's fuselage firstly even though the tri 7 x is still basically an aluminum fuselage like most other airliners are key part of the Fus LGE is actually made of

a newer lighter aluminium lithium alloy now changes like that can add to the development time of a design but Boeing felt that it was definitely worth it since the use of these alloys would save a lot of weight other modern aircraft like the Airbus A380 the a350 and especially the a220 were already using this material in their designs but probably the biggest change that Boeing planned around the construction of the fuselage involved robots these form part of a system called the fuselage automated upright build or faou so what was that about then well basically in

noral cases unless they're made of Composites aircrafts are made by joining together metal Parts with fasteners which are usually rivets traditionally this work was done manually which kind of sucks because each airliner may have millions of rivets with the boing 747 famously needing about three million of them boing's fa system would instead use robots to automate this extremely labor intensive process boing figured that automation like this should save both money and time time which in the end also is money but unfortunately for boing it turned out that the fou project didn't meet its LOF the

expectations they started testing this system in 2015 and already from the very beginning they experienced a lot of problems which the workers the system was created to replace then had to fix by hand these were initially considered teething issues but late in 2019 boing announced that they were abandoning the fob conent completely the the time needed to fix these various errors simply caused a longer build time than it would have been if the work would have all been done by hand from the very beginning now some automation was eventually introduced anyway for part of the

work but the machines just couldn't replace the humans at least not this time fortunately though boing had better luck with the automated assembly of the new composite wings of the 7x but the wings production was still a bit of a challenge for them like I said the design of the wing borrowed heavily from the design of the Boeing 787 but one key difference was that the 787 Wing was made by Mitsubishi heavy Industries in Japan for the trip 7x boing instead built a brand new composite Wing facility in Everett to save having to ship Wings

halfway around the world something that would have been really tricky for wings of that size anyway that facility cost boing over $1 billion to construct and as Scott Hamilton in liham news pointed out Boeing built it with plenty of spare capacity so that they would be able to use it for future aircraft projects as well and that was likely because at that time boing still planned to launch another smaller midmarket or midsize airplane which was known at the time as the nma now boing and their employees faced a significant learning curve as they got that

Wing Factory up and running there were even some early fears that that the wing production could be a source of delays to the whole program and that might well have been the case but in the end any such delays didn't matter much at all and that's because of other even bigger headaches happening at the same time involving the plan's monstrous ge9x engines the first issues involved changes needed to make sure that the engines would meet the performance and efficiency expectations which is something that isn't unusual at all for new engines but then later more serious

delays occur due to failing variable stator veins inside of the engines and these issues were found during flight testing under the wing of the General Electric 747 test bed by the way have you ever seen pictures from those test flights that monster engine looked completely ridiculous almost photoshopped under that 747 wing it really shows just how big it is it actually wouldn't even fit under the wing unless its pylon was tilted upwards anyway later even more engine delays were announced after an unsatisfactory blade out test on the ground and on top of that at one

point General Electric announced even more delays because of unscheduled maintenance to the 747 test bed's own engines and as that wasn't enough then came the incident where one g9x engine was actually damaged in a hard Landing as it was being shipped to boing inside of an antal 124 all of these engine and Wing delays meant that by the Autumn of 2019 the program was behind schedule by at least a year and it wasn't going to get any better in September of 2019 the fuselage of a 7x ruptured during pressurization testing on the ground with a

simulated high G load this understandably got a lot of publicity but it wasn't actually as devastating as it seemed on those videos the failure happened at 100 48% of the limit load meaning 48% more than the maximum load that the aircraft could legally experience in Flight the goal was 150% or one and a half times the limit load which is a limit known as the ultimate load that failure was actually so close to the Target that boing didn't have to retest the design they just had to explain how they would strengthen the design to fix

the issue and in any case the engine problems that were happening at this time meant that the delays from the airframe base basically had no real effect but one thing that has an effect is you subscribing to the channel right now and liking the video anyway that failed precarization test meant that boing had to completely write off that airframe but all of this trouble that I've just explained only delayed the tri 7 X Program by a little over a year the first 7-9 performed it Maiden flight in January of 2020 but by then it was

clear that another Factor would delay the aircraft introduction to service much longer and this was obviously the two fatal 727 Max crashes which happened in late 2018 and early 2019 the added scrutiny which these crashes brought to both Boeing and especially the FAA meant that the way that the FAA was going to certify new aircraft from then on would have to change one of those changes involved the fact that the FAA would need to do a lot more of the certification directly themselves instead of delegating it to FAA authorized boing personnel as they had done

before and on top of that the FAA and others were also looking closely at Boeing for any links between the certification programs of the 727 Max and the trip 7x obviously there was no calls from anyone to rush the certification process at this point but the more direct work that the FAA had to do inside of the Boeing factories the more both Boeing and the FAA had to ReDiscover how to work together and that took some time the implications of the max crisis also included some extra scrutiny from foreign Aviation authorities who now insisted on

also getting directly involved with the certification process this affected the triple 7x program just like it affected the Max and it brought on even more delays the pandemic obviously didn't help things either and Russia's escalation of the war in Ukraine introduced even more issues on top of the obvious impact from things like the supply chain and that's because weirdly enough Boeing's Tri 7x was partially designed in Moscow since Boeing had launched a new design center there in 2013 before Russia's annexation of CHA then in 2022 boing shifted resources away from the tri 7x program to

focus on certifying the remaining 737 Max variants and if that wasn't enough more engine issues stopped flight testing again for around two months later in that same year so basically that was a lot of different issues but what effects has this actually had on Boeing and the industry in general well if we look at Boeing one thing that we often forget is that the production of airliners today generally begins well before they enter service actually the planes that we call prototypes or test planes are aren't really prototypes in the normal sense at all like how

Boeing's old 367-80 was the 707 prototype for example today um for quite some time now the first test aircraft are usually built in the same production line where the rest of the planes will eventually be built and many test aircraft will actually go on to fly for airline customers when the testing is done that means that the boring production line for the Triple 7x actually started in 2018 even before the type's first flight now obviously it was a very slow production rate but the line still started costing money for boing already back then remember the

initial plan was that the triple 7-9 would enter service just a year after the prototype's first flight just like the first Triple 7 had done now obviously that didn't happen which means that Boeing is now spending a lot of money on a line that is not yet producing any Revenue now to be fair here in this case the production line of the Legacy trip 7 is still running making freighter so it is quite likely that boing could shift a lot of personnel between the old and the new Tri 7 program saving quite a bit of

money doing it that way but obviously that older production line didn't include the production of certain parts that are unique to the triple 7x like the wing for example and then there are of course the airlines who are well let's say less than impressed by all of this with a delay this long many of the airlines who had initially purchased the tri 7x were actually able to cancel their orders without penalty or to switch their orders over to a different type like the boing 787 with extremely good terms but despite the delays and cancellations Boeing

today has over 450 orders for tri 7x variants 205 of which are from Emirates alone and they are not happy with this situation at all like I said earlier Lanza was technically the launch customer for the tri 7x with an initial order of 34-9 which they made in September back in 2013 but at the Dubai air show that same year Emirates ordered 150 7 XS with Qatar ordering another 50 lansa later decided to defer the delivery of its yet making Emirates the de facto launch customer now they had made this huge order to cover their

planned replacement of many of their legacy Tri 7 300 ER and the plan was for the replacement to begin already in 2020 when the new jet was supposed to be ready so with all of these delays Emirates was less than pleased when Boeing on top of everything else decided that they also needed to launch a freighter variant of the tri 7x called the trip 78 Fox they did this because Airbus launched the a350 fox which was clearly aimed at providing an alternative to Airlines operating the trip 7 and 747 freighter who needed to replace them

now this move made sense on paper but it also stalled some resources away from the passenger variants which obviously Emirates and other customers were really waiting for so this plus giving priority to the certification of the 737 Max meant that the service entry date of the triple 7-9 has now slipped into 2025 and as for the -8 well it hasn't even flown yet I fully understand emirate's frustration here because this situation leaves them with very few choices especially since like I mentioned in the previous video the Airbus a 351,000 which would have been a possible

alternative has its own problems which stopped Emirates from ordering more of those with lold travel now fully recovered in many parts of the world other airlines are Keen to get their trip 7 X's too so there is some real demand for this aircraft which I completely understand because if Boeing and General Electric deliver on their promises the tri 7-9 will have 20 to 21% better per seat economics than the 7 300 ER has 10% of those comes from the Eng 7% from that super long wing and the rest from the size and weight related improvements

finally it's worth pointing out just how Troublesome this trend of longer and longer aircraft development times are it is obviously extremely costly for the aircraft manufacturer since they don't start getting a return on their Investments until well 12 years later in this case so these delays are making new programs far riskier to even start on top of of that the airline industry is a cyclical business and 12 years after a program is launched the needs of the market could be completely different than what they were designed for when the aircraft was actually made because of

this both Airbus and Boeing are looking for ways to bring these development times down to stay more Nimble and that their ability to do that will likely be the next Arena these Giants will fight on now join me on patreon to discuss this in my next Zoom hangout or get yourself and awesome t-shirt and make sure to download my free Mentor app to get your latest Aviation news have an absolutely fantastic day and I'll see you next time bye-bye