Former Boeing engineer's warning at odds with consensus
A former Boeing engineer sharply attacked the crash safety of the 787's all-composite fuselage in a televised interview, sparking a rash of headlines, but also sparking a counter-attack from industry.
Forty-six year Boeing veteran Vince Weldon, who said he was fired last year for internally voicing his concerns, publicly warned that the 787 is being rushed into service before the company and the US Federal Aviation Administration understands how the structure will behave in a crash.
Weldon's attacks strike at the heart of the industry's consensus decision to embrace reinforced carbon fibre composites as an equally safe alternative to aluminium.
"He's completely off the mainstream of the expert community in terms of composites and everything else," says a source familiar with aircraft certification programmes.
Weldon argues that the 787's composites will catch fire faster than metal and could shatter and not crumble like aluminium, leaving passengers to absorb more of the force of the impact. But that claim is disputed by recent NASA-sponsored crashworthiness tests on all-composite fuselages.
"Composites can be designed for essentially any purpose that you want," says John Tomblin, executive director of the National Institute for Aviation Research. "If I want to crush it I can tailor it that way to make it crushable."
Boeing says that Weldon's concerns were fully investigated by the company and dismissed as invalid. The company adds that Weldon, who worked on composite structures with the Space Shuttle programme, was not a specialist on composite materials for civil aircraft.
As the end September deadline for delivery of the 787's flight control software approached, supplier Honeywell was writing code that had originally been set for August delivery. Honeywell and Boeing manpower is being brought to bear to write the highly complex, 6 million lines of software that must be finished before the first 787 can go through the static "power on" trial that precedes first flight. "It is a question of manpower [to finish the FCS]," says Boeing product marketing director, Jim Haas, speaking at the Alenia Composites' Grottaglie production facility.
Previous FCS software versions have been tested for a year on leased Boeing 777, where the pilots were able to switch between its FCS and the 787 software.
The 787's maiden flight has already been delayed from mid-November to mid-December owing to problems with supply of the titanium fasteners needed for the aircraft's composite fuselage sections and lack of software code. Boeing can afford little more delay if it is to meet its May deadline for delivering the first aircraft to launch customer All Nippon Airways.
Additional reporting by Rob Coppinger
Source: Flight International
