In his first public appearance, Boeing’s newly-appointed head of commercial aircraft development challenged his staff to take a bold approach to designing new products, emphasising the value engineering judgment calls over strictly adhering to bureaucratic processes and a slavish devotion to the data.
Boeing’s rigid processes are necessary for the company to deliver more than 700 commercial aircraft a year, but are sometimes an obstacle when developing new products, says Mike Delaney, who succeeded Scott Fancher in March as vice-president and general of aircraft development for Boeing Commercial Airplanes.
“The thing I struggle with the most is we seem to have become a process-based function where following the process is more important than the result,” says Delaney, speaking on 13 June at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)’s annual aviation conference in Washington DC.
“There’s a lot of discussion inside Boeing where it takes judgment, it takes courage, and it takes the ability to take bold steps,” says Delaney. “In order to move to the next level you really have to have poeple who are willing to take some judgment calls and take some bold steps and sometimes that requires a little bit to colour outside the lines, and I think we’re quick to try to put people back inside the lines.”
Delaney also called on his engineers to avoid an over-reliance on modern software-based tools, such as finite element modeling (FEM), used to predict the performance characteristics of a new aircraft.
“Get up on the board and draw a free-body diagram,” Delaney says he tells his engineers. “Tell me the forces and moments on the airplane, and don’t tell me what the FEM said. We’ve got to get back to some of those basics.”
Delaney’s organisation was established in 2012 by Fancher in the wake of the serial design and production breakdowns that significantly delayed the 747-8 and 787-8 programmes. As such, Fancher throughout his tenure emphasised a strict adherence to standardised processes in order to avoid making costly mistakes based on faulty judgment calls.
That approach helped Boeing to usher the 787-9 through development while ramping up overall 787 production to 10 per month, as well as keeping the 737 Max 8 development programme on schedule so far.
But Delaney seems to be calling for greater flexibility as his organisation plots new variants of the 737 Max in the near-term, a new mid-sized aircraft (NMA) to replace the 757 by 2025 and eventually a clean-sheet design to replace the 737.
Delaney also says the company remains “excited” about the NMA concept, which he called an aircraft that can seat 200-250 people that can fly between 4,500-5,000nm. Also known as the middle of the market (MoM) concept, cost will be a critical factor in developing the business case for the NMA, he says.
“It’s putting a new airplane into a space which means we have to solve the non-recurring and the recurring problems to really make it work,” Delaney says. “We want to sell the airplanes today at the same price and same cost and yet continue to give 10-20% more economic value to our airlines and our industry.”
Source: Cirium Dashboard
