Boeing 787 - everything on schedule as planned

One thing we learnt from the 2 hour 787 Program Update Conference Call this morning was that Pata Shanahan's wife and family haven't seen much of him since he took on the jpb of overseeing the program.

The good news is that they are sticking with the previously announced schedule with no slippage on flight testing, first delivery or delivering 109 planes by end 2009."The plan we announced in October for the 787 is unchanged: to fly the first airplane around the end of the first quarter of 2008 and begin deliveries in late November or December timeframe, and to deliver 109 airplanes in 2009,' CEO Carson said. 'That is our team's commitment, and we intend to perform to that commitment.'

Shanahan sounded the guy you need to command the lifeboat, calm, controlled and you get the feeling a few butts have been kicked and processes straightened out.'There's no doubt our ramp-up is aggressive, but throughout this effort we have not found any fundamental flaws in our production system design that would lead me to believe it's not doable,'

A sharp lady from Credit Suisse nailed the major investors concern "can they meet the 6 a month rate of manufacture to hit the 109 by end 2009" a rate not met before on any other prgram, Pat is confident that the new technology and the heavy capital investment will result in faster tunround in Everett.

Morgan Stanley was concerned about weight shedding "was there more to lose ?" the CEO chipped in " ..there is some more" .. but he didn't (natch) let on how much.

All in all an impressive example of meeting criticisms head on, laying out the plans and provididing ahigh level of transparency .. they just need to hit the numbers now. If they don't after this performance confidence willebb pretty fast.

Amazing how people kept niggling away at fasteners ..and how the probmes they had had with them were evident.

The really good news is that Rolls Royce will supply the power plants for 4 of the flight test planes and GE the remaining two and there are no problems there at all...and the Honeywell flight software is on song.

They just have to get everyone on song with this Lego plane to put it all together , they are doing all theright things and the guy in charge sounds supremely confident.

'Our schedule becomes much more predictable once we get the power on because the airplane is finally in the state that our factory was designed for,' Shanahan said. 'Once we have power on, (scheduled for early January) we can perform basic integrated functional testing and then transition to' remaining testing, he said.

Fingers crossed...oh and Pat conceded these impreovements had been bought at a cost in response to someone from Lehman Bros. He wasn't sating how much it had hit the budget .. and frankly that wasn't his concern it appeared. Who can blame him.

Mrs Shanahan and family are going to continue seeing very little of their husband and father.

Asked to put a figure on the chances of them hitting the schedule - 70%. YJose FUF's and "unk unk's" just keep getting in the way...and this is a mighty complicated piece of Lego.