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Boeing’s Albatross
In my year-end forecasts for 2010 I predicted:
-Boeing will finish a few Dreamliners but they will face many delays and problems.
Looks like I am going to be wrong again. There is a now a question if
any of these troubled planes will be put into service this year. The
latest problem is not with the body of the plane. It is the engine that
is supposed to keep this beast in the air.
Bloomberg reported today that on August 2 the Rolls Royce Trent 1000 engine literally blew up while being tested.
The explosion resulted in “limited debris” being released into the test facility,” Rolls-Royce spokesman Josh Rosenstock said.
Uncontained failures are “extremely rare” said Paul Hayess, safety director at U.K. aviation consultants Ascend Worldwide.
Think of this engine blowing up. It is the size of a cement truck.
RR
is attempting to make this development a ‘no big deal’. But three weeks
after the explosion the testing facility has not be reopened. So how
big was that explosion? From the Bloomberg article:
Rolls-Royce
could switch testing of the Trent 1000 to other locations around the
world, according to a person familiar with the programs, who declined to
be identified because the information isn’t public.
Earlier in August Boeing said that the first deliver of the Dreamliner
to All Nippon Airlines might be delayed to sometime in 2011 due to “flaws with the structure”. Now we know that the engines may explode.
Boeing built a plane made of fiber that has structural flaws and an
engine that took out the test sight. Do you want to fly in this plane? I
don’t.
Ah! Well a-day. What evil looks
Had I from old and young,
Instead of the cross, The Albatross
about my neck was hung.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Coleridge
»
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...from Shinola.
I think it needs longer landing gear once the explosion issues are sorted out............
But I dont know shit about aerospace testing or manufacturing processes
Heavens!
its readily apparent that you dont know shit about aerospace testing or manufacturing processes.
The Trent engines are amazing and safe IMO. Loads of them flying around the world right now.
RR does extensive ( and expensive ) testing by deliberately blowing them up.
The "containment" is 100% AFAIK .. no parts fly outside the shell.
They also only sell them with their RT-maintenance package whoch means the engines are monitored by RR in RT during flight as well.
AFAIK, the model for Boeing is the biggest so far.
FWIW
The Dreamliner promised a lot but the new technologies have not delivered so far but trouble. The weight saved by using composites are mostly gone because of much needed structural reinforcements. Now the highly efficient engine has problems; and you can bet the fix will reduce the gains. Then suddenly one realizes the high initial cost for the system won't be recouped by low fuel consumption over the service life as promised and the (not so) "green" label won't help if people are afraid of using it.
In the end Boing will make it fly safely, I'm sure, but all summed up it won't be a good deal for the investors as envisioned years ago.
> The weight saved by using composites are mostly gone because of much needed structural reinforcements.
Yeah but all the weight's down low now so it should corner beautifully.
No I don't. Just read the papers. You do I assume. You flying in this? Good luck.
Rolls Royce intentionally blows up plenty of engines during testing, I doubt there would a serious issue if it happened accidentally. Building anything new involves trial and error, the inly real difference nowadays is that we access to this info - if you had the same info for your car or any other complex machinery you would probably be afraid to use them as well.
hope this helps my 2008 Boeing shorts (bleeding profusely but holding on resolutely)..
Like an A320 is any better,LMAO.
Bruce, I don't know about this either. But my take on this is that should an engine explode, ie a fan blade breaks, then the engine failed a containment test which means debris came sideways out through the engine cover. OK thats not good. It doesn't mean the engine will explode, but if there is a problem then maybe the seats on the wing aren't where you want to be....
The Trent1000 engine wouldnt be so close to service if it hadn't passed this test before. However the RR silence is worrying.
Here is video of a trent engine passing such a test, ironically from a recent TV series on how good british engineeing is:
http://redux.com/stream/item/1441125/Rolls-Royce-Trent-Engine-Testing
M, Thanks for this link. I loved the part where he described the force of a fan blade breaking as equivalent to a car falling a 100 feet.On a plastic plane....
Hell yeah, I do, and I will. I have trusted my career and my life to Boeing's 747 and Rolls Royce engines daily for a quarter century. I sleep more securely at night because I don't have to put my trust in Airbus.
Boeing is simply without peer.
count me in, too. Tho the A320 is ok, the rest of them suck. Prefer GE and that this thing was made 100% here.
But this whole shit about floppy wings, gfd half the planes aloft have composite wing sections now.
We'll see how well the "globally sourced" shit works out; so far, not as well as hoped.
Flag as junk?? A lifetime of aviation experience and you flag my comment as junk? Is INFORMED commentary a new experience for you?
Man, you're the sort of people who'd tell Timmie Geithner that he doesn't know anything about banking.
If I was Timmy Geithner I'd try like hell to convince the people myself that I didn't know what I was doing. I sure wouldn't want them knowing this was on purpose :-P
Oh, everyone gets flagged here these days. Possibly a disgruntled Airbus employee. I shouldn't worry about it. I'm going to junk myself as soon as I've posted this just to save someone some time...
I'm sure as hell not flying in this thing. Maybe after it has a 20-year record of successful flying... maybe.
"Boeing is simply without peer." -- comparing modern-day Boeing to its glorious past is an apples-to-oranges exercise. Boeing is not anything like the company it used to be just as the United States is not anything like the country it used to be.
Was this a bird-ingestion test? Did they use a standard chicken or a gelatin block?
Did they thaw out the chicken first? No engine can take a frozen chicken and not explode.
Maybe you and Krasting should jump in your cars and take a drive. That would be much safer. People have weird ideas about what is safe and safer. Driving a car is among the most dangerous things an average individual does. Most of us do it everyday, we trade the convience for the danger and don't think twice about it.
"Boeing is not anything like the company it used to be just as the United States is not anything like the country it used to be."
I agree with the statement but we are now a kinder, gentler country than we were with good food supply and steady state entertainment for everyone .
And it is much easier to show amazing progress during the initial ramp up a technology curve than it is as the technology matures. No matter the era, when trying to save money and take short cuts, sometimes things happen. Witness the Hindenburg (cheap hydrogen instead of expensive helium). Three mile island, Apollo I.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Apollo1-Crew_01.jpg
Chaffee didn't unstrap his harness. He kept reading temperature data until he started screaming.
But that is what we were and it resulted in a management shakeup that gave the country a successful Apollo program.
Apollo 11 made possible man's first steps on the moon by a man that had, for two years, shared a college campus with a man who died screaming. Apollo 13 made the world think that the US could do anything. But by that time, no one was taking shortcuts.
Then there was the little matter of the O-rings and later tiles in the shuttle program.
So Rolls has had a failure. Was anybody killed? So far I can't find a statement of that. Must have been a safe, if expensive, failure.
Thomas Watson (a responsible coporate head) of IBM famously gave advice for success. "increase your rate of failure."
People looking back on this, will take very little note of the failure. The transport provided by successful, safe product that results from the program will be the right of every citizen.
Lot better than traveling by stagecoach.