WCA July 2008

Statue of Liberty Image from BigStockPhoto.com Photographer: Marty

Over the ensuing week, American Airlines, a unit of AMR Corp (Fort Worth, Texas) would cancel a total of 3,082 flights. Some 338,000 people would have their travel plans disrupted. Among them would be thousands of recruits en route – or so they thought – to military bases around the country to begin basic training for service in Iraq and Afghanistan. On 10 th April the airline said that fixing the planes and compensating the travellers will cost “tens of millions of dollars.” Shortage of fasteners figures in the postponement of the Boeing ‘Dreamliner’ 9 th April was a bad day for another big name in the US aviation industry: aircraft maker Boeing Co, which announced a third delay in its 787 Dreamliner programme. Boeing has 892 firm orders for the innovative plane, from some 61 airlines. The company had planned to deliver the first Dreamliner in May, with more than 109 of the craft expected to be in production by the New Year. Under the revised schedule, Boeing will deliver nothing this year and only 25 planes in 2009 – less than a quarter of the planned complement for that year. “We’ve decided to add additional margin to the programme,” said Scott E Carson, president of Boeing commercial aviation, in a conference call with analysts and reporters. “It is a more conservative approach and it is the right way to go.” Chicago-based Boeing’s headaches with the Dreamliner were triggered by some design problems but mainly by bottlenecks in the supply chain. Delivery of parts – principally of fasteners – has been irregular. Expressing the company’s regrets for having to disappoint its customers, Mr Carson blamed the delay at least in part on the uncertainties implicit in having a far-flung network of suppliers. To help resolve some of these, Boeing executives have taken to the road to improve communications with suppliers of critical components, especially those in Japan and Russia. Boeing announced in March that it would buy out the interest of a supplier – Vought Aircraft Industry – in an assembly plant near Charleston, South Carolina. In another effort to protect the Dreamliner programme, Boeing said it has provided cash advance payments to another major supplier, Spirit Aerosystems Holdings (Wichita, Kansas), which was affected by the delays. In the conference call with reporters Mr Carson struck a note that was in equal parts optimistic and realistic. “Our supply base is healthy,” he said. “We’ve improved the assembly of our major sections. We’re focused and we are applying lessons learned. We are close to overcoming the delays and will bring this breakthrough plane to our customers.” Indeed, customers for the Dreamliner, the fastest-selling plane in aviation history, may deem it worth the wait. Carriers are drawn to its new, largely composite design and innovative next-generation jet engines that will allow the wide-bodied plane to fly farther on less fuel. It may be a consolation in Chicago that Luxembourg-based Airbus is at least four years behind in development of the A350XWB – Europe’s answer to the Dreamliner. The redesigned A350 (the XWB signalising ‘extra-wide-body’) is not scheduled for delivery to the first customers until 2013.

Aviation

American Airlines learns the high cost of faulty wiring maintenance At intervals, wiring becomes front-page headline news in the general press, and the casual reader learns that negligence in its installation and/or maintenance has had very large consequences for yet another US corporation. “American Cancels 1,000 More Flights for Inspection” – the lead story in the New York Times for 9 th April – recounted the latest instance. The airline had scratched 1,094 flights, or nearly half its schedule, in an intensive but ragged effort to rectify wiring problems on its fleet of MD-80 jetliners. The Times ’ Jeff Bailey reported that the emergency grew out of an industrywide Federal Aviation Administration examination into compliance with its inspection directives. The agency, finding scores of planes out of compliance, grounded planes at American and other airlines including Southwest and United. American had inspected the wiring bundles on its planes and believed it had rectified the problem two weeks earlier. The FAA, upon re-inspection of the planes on 7 th April, found that bundles on some of American’s MD-80s were incorrectly wrapped and attached to the wheel wells, and ordered them redone. An American Airlines spokesman, Tim Wagner, offered reasons why this second round of work was proving so disruptive. “It took a little while to get all the teams in place last night,” he told Mr Bailey, in reference to the dispatch of mechanics to eight cities where the repairs were to be performed. “Then a thunderstorm and lightning in the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport area kept workers off the ramp for a time during the night.” The cancellations hit hardest at the carrier’s biggest hubs: O’Hare International, in Chicago; LaGuardia Airport, in New York; St Louis; and Dallas/Fort Worth and Austin, in Texas. The cancellations would mount throughout the day 9 th April, affecting an estimated 100,000 passengers. Those who had booked trips on American Airlines found themselves facing confusion and long delays, with no word on when things might return to normal. The airline said it tried to notify ticket-holders by means of travel agents, phone calls, email, cellphone text messages, and its own website, but Mr Wagner acknowledged that he did not know how many passengers had been reached and how many had been accommodated on other flights. Mr Bailey of the ❖ ❖ Times noted that rebooking people on other airlines could be problematic. “The airline industry is running its planes very full – at 80% or more,” he wrote. “Airlines have been grounding planes because of high fuel prices and out of a desire to constrict supply and thus force up fares to cover fuel costs.” This money-saving campaign will have been seriously set back by the difficulty American Airlines brought upon itself; because the problem with the wiring lay within its control, the airline was obliged to pay for hotel rooms, meals, and ground transportation for battalions of inconvenienced passengers. Mr Wagner, the spokesman for the carrier, said, “We probably ran out of hotel rooms in some places.”

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Wire & Cable ASIA – July/August 2008