US FAA Clears Boeing 787 Change To Carry More Weight
Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner is bulking up. The Federal Aviation Administration recently certified a change to the South Carolina-built plane that will allow the widebody to either carry more weight or fly farther, depending on how airline customers choose to use the updated plane.
The change is an increase to the 787’s maximum design takeoff weight, which marks the threshold for how heavy a plane can be at the start of a flight.
The FAA cleared Boeing to add roughly 10,000 pounds to the max takeoff weight for the 787-9 and 14,000 pounds to the 787-10, the largest variant of the Dreamliner family.
The 787-9’s max takeoff weight will jump from 561,500 pounds to 571,500 pounds, according to Boeing’s airport planning document for the 787 from October. The change allows the 787-9 to carry an additional 3 metric tons of payloads or fly an additional 350 miles, Boeing said, announcing the FAA approval on Monday.
The 787-10 will increase from a max takeoff weight of 560,000 pounds to 574,000 pounds. That enables the plane to carry an extra 5 metric tons or fly an additional 460 miles.
The 787-8, the smallest Dreamliner variant, kept the same maximum takeoff weight of 502,500 pounds.
“We started this effort after airlines sent Boeing a clear message: they wanted greater flexibility,” Boeing’s 787 chief project engineer John Murphy said in a blog post the company shared on Monday. “Some wanted the 787-10 to fly longer missions; others wanted the 787-9 to carry additional payload. … Boeing designed a solution that delivers both.”
For comparison, the four planes in Boeing’s narrowbody 737 MAX family all have a maximum takeoff weight below 200,000 pounds.
To accommodate the higher takeoff weight, Boeing said it “optimized and … redesigned key components,” including strengthening carbon fiber composite in the wing and midbody sections. For the 787-10, Boeing changed the landing gear pin and added a higher-rated wheel and tire.
All the 787-9 and 787-10 airplanes assembled in Boeing’s North Charleston, S.C., factory since December are “structurally capable of the higher weight,” the company said.
Airlines can choose to activate that new capability upon delivery or later on. For airlines, a heavier takeoff weight would change airport landing fees and route planning, so the change would need to be formally designated to each plane.
Boeing is also working on another certification to retrofit earlier 787s that were not built with the new weight capability. That retrofit would increase the maximum takeoff weight by 1,500-3,000 pounds.
Boeing is building the 787 at a rate of about seven to eight per month, and hopes to increase that cadence to 10 per month this year.
In January, CEO Kelly Ortberg warned that 787 deliveries could face some delays as airlines waited for safety regulators like the FAA to approve new seats and seat configurations. That won’t affect how quickly the planes move through Boeing’s factory, and Boeing generally doesn’t make the seats that are awaiting certification, but it could hold up some deliveries to airline customers.
Boeing originally built the 787 in its Everett factory, considered the largest manufacturing building in the world, before expanding and then moving all 787 production to the North Charleston facility.
In February, Boeing told employees it would move the “remaining engineering 787 work” from the Puget Sound region to North Charleston, according to the union representing those workers.
Source: The Seattle Times
