Boeing Shuffles Deliveries for First 787s

(MoneyWatch)  Over at Flightglobal.com, blogger Jon Ostrower says he's seen internal Boeing documents that show that:

• Delta Air Lines, Royal Air Maroc of Morocco and several Chinese airlines that had been scheduled to take some of the first 20 787s have backed away and now will take later Dreamliners;
• Japan's All Nippon Airways, which was the 787's launch customer, will take 11 of the first 30 to be delivered;
• Right now, nobody wants the first six planes that Boeing will use for its flight test program.

The reasons? There are two: 1) The economy, and 2) The 787 is overweight.

There's an immutable law in aerospace: the heavier a plane is, the more fuel it takes to get it up in the air and keep it there. Much as a heavily armored tank gets worse gas mileage than an economy car, a heavy airplane can't fly as far as a lightweight one.

It's also pretty common for the early models of a new airplane type to be overweight. Airbus recently went through this with its new A380, for example. Until you've got some hard data on how the plane actually performs in the air -- as opposed to wind tunnel tests and computer simulations -- engineers will err on the side of beefing the airplane to make it safe. That adds weight.

The problem for Boeing, in this instance, is that the 787 was designed to be a fuel-sipping, ocean-hopping, ultra-long-haul jet that airlines could use to open up routes between cities that they couldn't make a profit flying between before. Boeing promised airlines that it could fly at least 8,800 miles (that's 7,650 nautical miles for you industry types). But as Ostrower notes, independent analysis now pegs the 787's range at closer to 7,800 miles (or 6,800 nautical miles, if you prefer).

That's still plenty of range for All Nippon Airways, which has been planning to use its 787s at first on flights within Japan. But it certainly will impact plans for airlines that had been planning to use them for missions like flying from Asia to the Atlantic Coast of the United States, for example.

Last month, Shanghai Airlines' CEO complained that the first 787s weren't going to meet the performance standards promised by Boeing; today Ostrower says that the five Chinese airlines that had been scheduled to take about half of the first 20 jets now aren't scheduled to take any of the first 30. Instead, those planes seem to be headed to Royal Air Maroc and Japan Airlines. Similarly, the planes that once were headed to Delta (which had acquired them when it merged with Northwest Airlines), now will be split between Air India and Qantas, although Qantas is also said to be looking to delay its deliveries, due to financial issues.

All these moves also mean Boeing needs to find takers for the first six flight-test planes, Ostrower says. Those originally were scheduled for delivery to ANA, Royal Air Maroc and Delta.

"In the long run," the 787 will be "an excellent aircraft," according to the ever-quotable Steven Udvar-Hazy, CEO of International Lease Finance Co., the AIG subsidiary that's one of the world's biggest buyers of airliners. "But I pity the airlines that get the first ones," he said recently. "Obviously those aircraft will not be the same standard as those 787s later on."