« Boeing 787 Rollout Celebration | Main | And I ask you... »

What’s all this “revolutionary’ stuff?

So you say “The 787 just looks like a typical commerical jet to me, so whats all the hubub about”?

To better answer this, lets take a walk through the last 80 years of aviation.

Let’s take a look a this aircraft

Fokker Tri-motor

In the 1920’s this was “high tech”. A Metal passenger aircraft with three engines, this aircraft started the idea of commerical aviation as a reality. This aircraft is also a monoplane, meaning it has one wing, rather than a being a more typical biplane. Now, the reason why people flew biplanes in the good old days wasn’t because they were dumb, it was because the materials that were avaiable in those days determine the structures used.

Curtiss Condor. The standard prior to the Tri Motor

Biplanes arent just about providing two wing surfaces as much as it is also about providing a strong, structure for the wing(s). A structure that resembles that much like that found on an old bridge. Guy wires, struts, look at any old bridge and you see something that looks like it might belong on a biplane wing.

Remember, monoplanes were new in the 1920s. There had been a few examples prior to the 1920’s but large, passenger carrying aircraft, well for that, you wanted a biplane. That is until Mr. Fokker came out with his “cantiliever wing” and changed the paradigm.

Model of a DC-3 wing.(shown for its detail)

This wing design allowed all of the strength of the wing to be made by structures inside the wing itself. No wires, no “bridge like” structures for the wing, just a wing much like we know it today.

Mr. Fokker did this with the material that had the best chance of handling the loads and the material that he and his team had the most experience. That material wasn’t metal, but wood. The outer skin would be made of metal (giving the aircraft its affectionate nickname of “tin goose”), but the internal structures themselves would be made of the world's first “original composite” material, good old fashioned trees.

This revolutionary idea went along fine, the three engine layout provided enough power to get an aircraft under load through most trouble, and it allowed a start up airline enough safety to reassure a skeptical public that flying was a possibility. It wasn’t yet cheap enough for the masses, but it was getting closer.

Then in 1931, this happened.

Fokker Trimotor Crash, carrying "Knute Rockne" - All American.

It happened because the main wing spar failed. Remember, while the aircraft exterior is made of metal, the wing spar itself was made of wood. The wood decayed and Mr. Knute Rockne and the rest of the passengers died. Commerical Aviation came to a near halt almost before it got started.

Engineers and aircraft manufacturers got to work on new designs. Cantiliever wings would stay but wooden wing spars would go.

In 1933, Boeing came out with this aircraft.

Boeing 247.
A Multi Engine, cantiliever wing passenger aircraft. An all-metal canteliever wing. Now we are getting somewhere!

Unfortunately, the Boeing engineers did one thing wrong with the design:

Yes, Theres the wing spar, right there in the cabin with you! Right there where you can see it, touch it, step over it. Get to know your friend the wing spar, we don’t hide anything here at Boeing, step right up kids, be the first on your block to touch the wing spar!

Now, down in sunny Santa Monica California, Mr. Douglas was working on another design, The DC-1. Today we know the most famous version of this design as the DC-3.

A Multi-engine, All metal cantileiver wing. Oh, and no wing spar to step over. The DC-3 was, revolutionary because it managed to do something no other airliner before ever managed to do.

It made the airlines money. For the first time, you could fly people and cargo reliably and safely for less than the investment in the equipment. There wasn’t anything revolutionary in the technology that was used on the DC-3, it was just for the very first time, it was executed properly.

There were also a tremendous amount of other changes that occurred with the advent of the revolution of the DC-3. Prior to the DC-3, large aircraft had always been Seaplanes.

Dornier Do-X

Boeing 314

Short Brothers “Empire”.

This lead many people to believe that the future of air travel was the same as taking a sea cruise. So many large cities planned their air transportation around the idea of seaplanes being the primary carrier for passengers.

Laguardia Pan American Seaplane Base

San Francisco Seaplane Base

You say you don’t live in a big city near the coast? Well back of the train for you then.

The DC-3 changed all that. It didn’t just teach airlines that they could make money, in an odd sort of way, the DC-3 brought flying to the masses. Unlike with seaplanes, Air travel could be in any town or city anywhere. Cities began to build “airports” with formal runways (instead of “Fields”) and all of the infrastructure that came with it.

Now World War II, like all wars, greatly affected the technology of flying. The wartime DC-3, known as the C-47 brought the science of logistics and forward deployment of armies into reality. That lesson was brought home in a very different way in 1947 with the Berlin Airlift.

C-47's at Berlin during airlift

Without the products provided by the DC-3 and its progeny, the people of Berlin would have starved.

Now, the next revolution in aircraft is the revolution of “pressurization”. Pressurization means that the part of the aircraft that you sit in is pressurized to maintain an atmospheric pressure equivalient to a lower altitude.

“Lower altitude than what” you say?

Well, that’s where the revolution comes into play. Flying at high altitude provides you something that most people today don’t think much about. Weather.

In the good old days of aviation, back in the DC-3 era, you flew through storms, I mean right through them, not just during landing or takeoff either, but for hours you and your hapless pilot, crew and the rest of the passengers had to endure hours of being pounded by rain, hail, snow and ice. It was awful.

The way to get out of that weather; was to fly higher. To fly higher, you need to pressurize the cabin so that the passengers will survive the trip.

Now, to pressurize an aircraft fuselage, you do it the same way you blow up a ballon, you fill it with air, and yes, that means that the fuselage is like a ballon in that it that inflates and deflates each time it takes off and lands. Typically you pressurize a fuselage at the equivalent altitude of 8,000 ft. Thats why those people give you fluids on flights, its not to be ice ,its because at that altitude, you easily get dehydrated and that tends to make people who live at sea level pass out and have all sorts of other health problems. 8,000 feet is an average. Ideally, you would want to pressurize for sea level, but thats really difficult to do.

For the folks who flew back in the DC-3 era, being pressurized at all was something of a miracle. Flying over the weather rather than through it, made a world of difference to the flying community. Heres another example that illustrates how much different things were in just a single two year period, thanks to pressurization.

The Boeing B-17 (Circa 1943)

Heavy jackets, oxygen masks. This is how you did it in the 1930’s.

The Boeing B-29 (Circa 1945)
Pressurization in action.
The flight crew working in Shirt Sleeves and No oxygen masks. This is how you would do it from now on.

Boeing and Lockheed both made commercial aircraft that took advantage of the presurization.

Boeing 377 (Based on the aforementioned B-29)

Lockheed Constellation

Using the runways provided by the activies of World War II, Commerical air travel for the masses was starting to arrive.

There was just one problem left to solve. Time.

To cross the Atlantic, you needed to stop in Canada, Ireland, Iceland or Scotland and finally you would get to the Continent. It could be done, you could now fly to Europe, but it would take all day to do it. Every stop was a potential problem with weather and the mechanics of aircraft.

There was also another problem. The aircraft that were most capable of this flight, while magnificent beauties, were complex expensive beasts to fly. These aircraft required a 5 member flight crew, one of which was responsible for just watching the engines ( known the the flight engineer). The pilot had enough to do just flying these great beasts a man had to be set aside to do nothing but watch the various gauges and keep the engines running.

Flight Engineer Seat

Or at least try to:

Boeing 377 “Soveriegn of the skies” Ditching at Sea, 1956

This happened a lot more often than we like to remember.

So, how do we go higher and faster, and yet cheaper still than we already have?

Theres only one way to go.

Jets.

The Canadians and the British got there first, but both answers to the problem failed to answer the more important problem with commerical airlines, and that is the profit question. The DeHavilland Comet was the world’s first commerical jet and it was a magnificent aircraft. (By the way, they beat the Canadian effort by one day.)

With just two flaws.

The first is in this picture:

See it? It’s right there in front of you. Look closely at those windows. Those "Square" Windows?

Failed Comet Fuselage

Those “square windows” are killers. You don’t see square corners in pressurized aircraft. Remember what I was saying earlier about the act of pressurizing a fuselage being like blowing up a long kids ballon. Sharp right angles don’t tend to survive cycles of inflation and deflation very well,and on the de Havilland Comet, they didn’t survive very well either. And in two very sad accidents, the world of Commerical Jet aviation took a serious setback.

As is often the case, the first is not always the one to get it right, but unlike the Boeign 247, it would be Boeing this time that would get it right.

The Dash-80.

The Boeing Model 367-80 (known as the “Dash-80”) was the one that got it right. The final commercial version, known as the 707 brought Commercial aviation to the masses. World wide travel on a budget, in comfort and safety that could be accomplished by the middle class was a reality. This aircraft changed commerical aviation forever, not just because it was jet powered but because of one other thing that was seriously missing on the De Havilland Comet.

Look at the size.

Just eight windows (eight square windows…)
b707_04

One look says it all. The Comet could only carry 36 passengers. The 707 carried 165. At the end of the day, the airline business is a “butts in seat” business.

Again, if the airline flying your aircraft can’t make a profit, it doesn’t matter how cool it is. All of that engineering is wasted if the people in a position to buy the aircraft in the first place can’t make money flying it.

And that brings us to today. Today is the day that the Boeign 787 arrives, and as I’ve said, its revolutionary, not evolutionary.

Up till now, we've had Cantiliever wing, multi engine, pressurization and jet power as the revolutions that have driven the airline and aircraft industries.

Now we have a new revolution and it goes all the way back to our first example, the Fokker Trimotor.

Remember, Mr. Fokker used wood in his main wing spar. He did that because it was light and because it was a material that his engineers felt most comfortable working with.

So what is a “Main Wing Spar”? If you stand at the edge of a wing and look towards the fuselage, imagine a big I-Beam running straight down the wing all the way to the other wing tip. That is the “main wing spar”. That structure, and its ability to be strong and yet flexible, is what drives the all decisions for what materials are chosen for aircraft design. The "Main Wing Spar" and the technology that drives it, is what determines nearly everything in aircraft design.

The next time you fly, look out your window and watch the wing. It bounces, it flaps and flops around. It is not – solid. Its not supposed to be, its precisely that ability to flex that allows it to survive all of the things that the pilots and the atmosphere can throw at it.

So we’ve gone from wood spars, to metal spars. And today we take another step, and it’s a big step forward. The main wing spar of the 787 is made of composites. That’s right, the main wing spar is made of materials that come from a laboratory. Why is this big and "revolutionary"? Because the spar is not only made from materials that are man made the main spar is also contructed in a very different way. It’s also machined by computers! The use of composites represents not just a change in what aircraft are made from, but how they are made and who makes them.

Composite materials are made from highly computerized machines, which are then fed into other highly computerized machines. These parts, the main wing spar, and the sections of the fuselage itself are milled from start to finish by – computers.

Composites are attractive for aircraft designers because they are both light and strong. Lightness is essential to Aircraft engineers because a everything you take up in the sky has to have some element of lift and thrust in order that it fly. Composites have been used in components of aircraft for awhile now, and aircraft have been manufactured using nothing but composites.

Beech Starship.Pioneer in Composite aircraft construction.

But now, for the first time, the entire main structure of a commercial aircraft, the main wing spar, the wing structures itself and the fuselage are using composites and not just the skin (like was done with the old the “Tin goose”).

Now, take a look at the “factor floor” of the last generation of aircraft.

And…

Boeing737airframe-DaveWilliams-WichitaEagle

Now take a look at what it took to make the 787:

Whats missing? People. On Aluminum aircraft, you have thousands and thousands of rivets to bring all that metal sheeting together. All those boxes in the background of the factory? Rivets.

On composite aircraft? No rivets – ergo – no people.

Well, not as many people anyway. And what people are involved are now distrubuted all over the globe to take advantage of the world economy, for while the aircraft components are build all over the world, they are all finally assembled in Everett Washington.

No aluminum also means no corrosion, no corrosion means no downtime for inspections. Remember, aircraft sitting around do not make money. Making major componeneets out of composites makes everything about owning an aircraft that much cheaper.

The aircraft that is rolling out today, has been assembled with a very small staff in a little under 30 days from parts built all over the world, using structures that were created by machines from materials developed in a laboratory.

The result is an aircraft that before its first flight has already impacted every aircraft manufacturer in the world. That is the true test of a revolution. There were lots of great prop planes in the 1950s but after the Boeing 707 came out, it didn’t matter; they were finished.

Worldwide sales for the 787 have already surpassed over 600 airframes, and virtually every single manufacturing slot from Boeing that has available until 2013 is now completely sold out. There is simply no more capacity to be had to make more of these aircraft, and all of the “costs going up” excuses aside, Boeing is actually rasing its price for the 787, not because it costs more, but because they can get more for it. Selling it at a discount is not in the cards when you are at capacity and there is no real competition. And for the next few years, there is no real competition for the 787.

In 10 years, any aircraft that is not made entirely of composite mateials will seem as out of date as anachonistic as the “Tin Goose” or the DC-3.

So today when you watch the 787 roll out, watch it with an eye towards the future because someday your going to tell your grandkids that you once flew on jets that were made entirely of metal and they will look at you like you rode into town on a covered wagon.

How do you know a revolutionary idea from an evolutionary idea?

- Once presented, a revolutionary idea changes the existing paradigm.

- Once presented, a revolutionary idea set the new standard.

- Revolutionary ideas cause a complete re-write of the metrics on systems.

Monoplanes were revolutionary to biplanes, metal revolutionary to wood and fabric, and now composite main structures.

Now that Boeing has done it, be they successful or not, there will never be any "going back" just as once metal aircraft fabrication was perfected, there would be no return to wooden aircraft ( for the sake of argument, Let's look past the example provided by the Mosquito).

From here on out, to be successful in the aircraft business, you will need to use composites at every level. Right now, theres only one group that is capable of delivering it, and thats Boeing.

Posted @ July 08, 2007 03:55 PM | Aviation

Posted by: Sine Nomine at July 8, 2007 07:07 PM

Posted by: shaulieh at July 9, 2007 10:19 AM

Posted by: frank martin at July 9, 2007 10:28 AM

Posted by: Nate at July 9, 2007 01:33 PM

Posted by: frank martin at July 9, 2007 02:25 PM

Posted by: TBinSTL at July 9, 2007 11:56 PM