Boeing’s Biggest 747 Begins Flight Testing Program
February 08, 2010
By Susanna Ray
Feb. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Boeing Co.’s 747-8, the biggest jumbo jet it’s ever built, flew for the first time today, joining the composite-plastic 787 Dreamliner in delayed flight-test programs the company now aims to complete by the end of the year.
The 747-8’s test, which lasted more than three hours, occurred just a day before the 41st anniversary of the original 747’s maiden flight. The jet landed at 4:18 p.m. local time at Paine Field in Everett, Washington, across from the factory Boeing built in 1967 specifically to house the aircraft and which is now also home to the 787, 777 and 767 assembly lines.
The 747 is more than a year behind schedule, pushed back by a need for more redesign work than Boeing had anticipated and by delays to the 787 Dreamliner that siphoned resources from the program. The 787 flew for the first time in December, more than two years late.
“People are really excited about this,” Brian Johnson, deputy test program manager for the 747-8, said in an interview while waiting for the jet to lift off today. “It’s been a long haul to get these two planes up in the air.”
Pilots Mark Feuerstein and Thomas Imrich, the only people aboard the 747-8 today, did basic testing of every system, both electric and hydraulic, to make sure everything worked as expected and shut down and restarted the engines while aloft. There were only four “squawks,” minor advisories that won’t prevent the plane from flying again, Imrich said.
‘Went Really Well’
“We were able to accomplish everything on the flight, and every single test condition went really well,” Feuerstein said at a press conference afterward.
The 747-8 jumbo jet has Boeing’s longest commercial wing, supporting a stretched fuselage that will have 16 percent more room in the freighter model, which is the variant that flew today and will be the first delivered. The passenger version can accommodate 51 extra seats and 26 percent more cargo volume.
“It was remarkable how good the fuel burn was with that new wing,” Imrich said. “It was noticeable during the flight and was pretty amazing.”
The 747 lost its ranking as the world’s biggest plane when Airbus SAS’s A380 entered service in 2007. It’s still the fastest, though, cruising at Mach .855 -- or 85.5 percent of the speed of sound -- and it could keep that title for some time to come as airplane design plateaus, said Joe Sutter, 88, the chief engineer for the first 747 and now a Boeing consultant.
One More Stretch
The 747-8 will probably sell for about 15 years, and then there’s room to stretch the wings one more time before they’re probably maxed out, Sutter said in an interview last month. It behooves Boeing to get as much as possible out of such a popular jet, because the jumbo-sized market is small and developing a brand-new offering might cost as much as $20 billion, he said.
Boeing “literally bet the company” with the first 747, taking a gamble that it came “perilously close to losing” as the company was overcommitted on too many fronts, Sutter wrote in his 2006 memoir, “747.” That plane, which was two and a half times bigger than any aircraft then in service, was delivered on time to Pan Am World Airways in December 1969, three and a half years after the program was launched and 10 months after the plane’s first flight.
The 747-8 variant began with orders from customers including Cargolux Airlines International SA more than four years ago, in November 2005. The model is once again proving a financial challenge for Boeing, with billions of dollars in charges since 2008 because of extra costs stemming from the delays and a lack of demand.
‘Pretty Good Profit’
“We’ve had a history of making a pretty good profit on our programs and making the margins, and I think we will here too,” Boeing Commercial Airplanes President Jim Albaugh said today. “When the freighter market comes back, this will be the freighter everyone’s got to have.”
Boeing has orders for 32 747-8 Intercontinental passenger planes, which have a list price of about $301 million apiece, and 76 of the $303 million freighter variants. Leasing firm Guggenheim Aviation Partners LLC cut its order for four freighter models in half in December because of uncertainty surrounding the timing of the deliveries.
The 467-seat Intercontinental is due to be delivered to the first customer at the end of 2011, a year later than planned. Boeing will start building that test plane around June of this year, said Mo Yahyavi, the 747 program chief.
The company expects a half-and-half split between cargo and passenger orders for the 747 going forward, marketing chief Randy Tinseth said in an interview last month. Boeing marketers in the 1960s figured the 747 would sell only about 50 passenger planes, according to Sutter’s book, while having a good future as a cargo jet, so the plane has always been designed with both in mind.
17 Million Flights
Boeing has delivered 1,418 jumbo jets since 1969, according to its Web site. The company says the 747 has made about 17 million flights, taking passengers and freight about 42 billion nautical miles, or about the distance of flying to the moon and back 101,500 times. The plane carries more than half the world’s air cargo.
The two other test jets for the 747-8 freighter are out of the factory and getting the final touches before they join the flight-test program in the coming month. In two to three weeks, the freighter that flew today will fly over the Cascade Mountains to Moses Lake, where it will be based during airworthiness testing before engineers and others are allowed onboard.
Overlapping Testing Programs
Eventually all three test jets will be based in Palmdale, California, at a Boeing military facility that was taken over to make sure both flight-test programs had enough room, since they’re overlapping because of the delays. The 787 is based out of Seattle’s Boeing Field, where the company’s test operations center is located. Altogether, the 747-8 will spend more than 1,600 hours in flight testing before certification by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The newest version of the 40-year-old jumbo jet borrowed the interior, wing design and the core of the General Electric Co. engines from the 787, and it shares some materials and flight-deck features with the 787 and 777. By and large, it’s still the same plane designed by Sutter and his team, dubbed “The Incredibles.”
“Look at the 747’s numbers, everything from fuel burn to weight-per-passenger to range, and it looks as good as everything else out there, and better in some cases,” said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group aviation consultancy in Fairfax, Virginia. While demand will shrink, he said, “the market for this plane has got another 40 years.”
Boeing’s new 747 jumbo jet soars in first flight
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