Much of the aviation industry is sweltering at the Dubai Air Show this week, but one plane everyone's talking about is sitting in a hangar north of Seattle. The Boeing 787 has yet to make its first flight, but both flight test aircraft (ZA001 and ZA002) and a static test plane (ZY997) are out of the repair shop after being sidelined for a design problem.
Engineers have fixed a the structural problem they found where the wing meets the fuselage -- a problem that postponed last summer's planned test flights. With the issue resolved, things appear to be back on track. Marketing V.P. Randy Tinseth writes on his blog that Boeing is moving forward with flight preparation. First up is validating the fix on ZY997 as "the focus turns to the static testing to be conducted later this month."
Meanwhile, Boeing workers are hard at work on ZA001, reinstalling the access doors, systems, seals and fasteners that allowed them to make the modifications to the wing join. Once everything is back in place and the mods to the static test plane prove successful, ZA001 (pictured above) will return to preflight activities, Tinseth writes.
"That includes repeating some of the tests we successfully performed prior to the discovery of the side-of-body issue, such as some gauntlet and taxi tests," he writes.
During the gauntlet testing Boeing engineers and flight test pilots put the airplane through a rigorous series of simulations on the ground. It's a chance for the engineers to make sure all the systems are behaving properly and a chance for everybody on the flight test team to make sure both people and machine are ready for the first flight. Gauntlet testing can last for many hours, the last one before modifications on ZA001 lasted 18 hours and included several intentional system failures to test all aspects of a flight while safely on the ground.
Taxi testing is simply a chance to give a new airplane a 'first drive' before taking flight. Pilots will start slowly, typically around 15-20 mph, to test ground handling and braking. Gradually pilots will increase the speed on subsequent tests to near takeoff speeds of about 170 mph.
With the static testing and ground/taxi tests still a few weeks away, Boeing continues to say the first flight will happen before the end of the year.
Photos: Boeing
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