Podcast: Why Boeing Has Delayed The 777X Yet Again

It’s been nearly five years since the cutting-edge aircraft first flew, but you won’t fly on one before 2026. Aviation Week’s team explains how we got here.

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Transcript

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Joe Anselmo: 

 Welcome to this week's Check 6 podcast. I'm Joe Anselmo, editorial director for the Aviation Week Network and editor-in-chief of Aviation Week & Space Technology Magazine. At the 2013 Dubai Air Show, then Boeing CEO Jim McNerney announced the launch of the 777X passenger airplane with a bang: Orders from Emirates and Qatar Airways worth $95 billion.

Quote, "It is a step-change in aircraft design and a step-change in propulsion," proclaimed Emirates chief Tim Clark. But he cautioned, "We'll have to wait seven or eight years for this to come."

Eleven years later, Boeing has pushed back first deliveries yet again, to 2026. That came two months after the airframer paused the certification program for the 777-9, the larger of the two variants, to assess a thrust failure link. Meanwhile, the company is laying off 10% of its workforce as it grapples with a strike by 33,000 machinists in the Puget Sound.

Why is it taking Boeing so long to bring the 777X to market and which airlines are most affected? Joining us are Guy Norris, Aviation Week's senior propulsion editor; the numbers guy, Daniel Williams, Aviation Week's director of Fleet Data; and safety editor, Sean Broderick, who will discuss the regulatory environment and how it is impacting the certification of new airplanes.

Guy, let's start off with you. You've been writing about the 777X since day one, that news conference back at the Dubai Show. It looks like it's going to be a great airplane. What's the holdup?

Guy Norris:   

Boy, Joe, how long have we got? We've only got a few minutes on this podcast, I know. Well, as you rightly remember, you and I were sitting beside each other, I think, November 2013 when that big announcement was made. Everybody's jaw dropped to the floor with the amount of money involved, the huge numbers. It looked like Boeing had completed a strategic masterstroke by coming out with this twin engine giant, which would really basically form the foundation for an A350-1000 competitor, an A380, 747-400 replacement, but all with just two engines. Amazing efficiency, Joe.

Now getting from there to where we are today has been a massive saga of early initial development delays with the composite wing, the engine itself having problems, the avionics side of it, which has been called into a question particularly by EASA, which I know Sean will get into later on, and all around this, the problems that Boeing had because of the COVID pandemic, the 737 MAX, the certification fallout from the accidents, running right up to today with the thrust-link failure that you mentioned in your introduction. So we're now looking at this amazing series of events, including all sorts of the usual development issues, but all sorts of additional outside influences, which let's face it, everybody had to go through.

Now, just before you get to the rest of everybody here, Joe, I wanted to just look at a couple of facts. If you look at programs, I've looked at all of them since the 2000s basically, the one distinguishing number that comes out to me is the time difference between first flight and entry into service. So the 747-8, for example, problematic though it was, we're looking at one year, eight months; 787, remember the nightmare that Boeing had with that? One year, 10 months. Even the MAX, one year, four months; the A320neo, one year, four months. The only time that anything really got out of hand initially was... Well, not even out of hand. The A380, for example, two years and six months. So what we're talking about now, 777X, as of today, if you delivered a 777X tomorrow, it would be four years and nine months since that first flight, so more than double any time we've seen in the past 20 years really.

Joe Anselmo:         

And that's just today. It's going to be longer obviously because they're not delivering until 2026 now.

Guy Norris:        

Absolutely, yes. You can basically add almost two years to that.

Joe Anselmo:    

Wow. Dan Williams, you helped put together the Aviation Week Intelligence Network's 2025 Commercial Fleet & MRO Forecast, which was just released this week. You and Brian Kough actually pushed back your 777X delivery forecast, even before Boeing announced its latest slip. Tell us why.

Dan Williams:  

We have to look in our crystal ball sometimes. With the latest release, we were studying it. When the engine link issue came out and you were looking and it came out on the one aircraft that was in Hawaii, and as Boeing kept digging and kept looking and realized that actually this issue was on all four test vehicles, so then you're like, "Okay, so it's a design flaw." When it's on them all and one of them hasn't flown for a little while and one of them has quite a few hours on it, not much utilization at all, there's some fundamental issue with it. So we looked at it. Boeing will have to go back to the drawing board. They're going to have to work out a fix. They're going to have to create a fix, they're going to have to implement a fix, and then they're going to have to test a fix. And that takes time.

Boeing already have somewhere between 20 and 30 777Xs already built, sitting on the ground. We don't know how many engine link issues any of those aircraft have, if any. We just don't know. So as soon as we were looking at that, we were like, it's potentially a billion-dollar problem that will completely shift our entry into service back by a year. Originally, if you'd have asked us four months ago, we're like, Boeing probably can get some deliveries by late 2025, we were not confident in early 2025 at all, and probably airlines wouldn't have introduced them into service until 2026. But in terms of a physical delivery on the order and delivery book, late '25, it had a chance.

As soon as this engine link issue happened, the first thing we did is we moved everything to the right. Literally every part of the 777X program just all got shifted one whole year to the right. So sometimes, I'm not saying we get lucky, because at the end of the day we take all the facts that we have presented and we have to make decisions on those. So that has a big impact obviously in the forecast. It has a big impact in MRO in the forecast.

Because going back to what Guy says, this aircraft is the 747-400 replacement. It's an A340 replacement. It's an A380 replacement. You look at the air operators that have it on order, nearly 50% of them are Middle East carriers, and they are going to be replacing A380s. Emirates are now left with a difficult decision potentially with some of their A380s. Do they keep them going a bit longer because they have no incoming huge aircraft? Even though we have seen this week the A350 of Emirates take to the skies for the first time. But we are still at the point where that is the natural replacement for these big aircraft. So it's a big blow to these big carriers. There's 500 or so on order. Most of these carriers are those carriers that had A380s in fleets or 747s in fleets: Emirates, Qatar, Singapore, Etihad, British Airways, Lufthansa. These are legacy, massive aircraft airlines, and they're going to have to deal another year at least without that aircraft.

Joe Anselmo:        

Speaking of massive aircraft, I remember back during the dark days of the COVID lockdown 2020, even '21, recording a Check 6 with Guy and Jens Flottau, where people were saying back then, "Hey, there's actually a silver lining in these delays because the 777X is too big. When demand comes back, that airplane is going to have too many seats." That's not the case anymore, is it? The market wants this airplane now.

Dan Williams:      

Yes. In terms of sustainability, in terms of efficiency, in terms of being able to move people, let's face it, Qatar brought back the A380 when they said they never would. However, it's brilliant on that Doha to London Heathrow route. You need big aircraft in these slot-constrained airports. We are seeing more airports all announce that they were going to go to a slot-constrained, and then they've reined it back in a bit. Well, what's going to happen is, if slots are going to start being constrained at airports, you're going to put the biggest aircraft you have available on that flight. So I agree. At the time, it was a blessing in disguise, if there is such a thing, for the 777X. I remember Jens saying it was the right aircraft just at the wrong time, but that right time is pretty close. The problem is Boeing are going to overshoot the mark.

Joe Anselmo:            

Sean Broderick, welcome. The certification environment for Boeing in 2013 was certainly a lot easier than it is today, to put it mildly, no?

Sean Broderick:      

Uh, yeah. Again, to steal from Guy Norris's playbook, how long do you have to talk about what's going on with the 777X in terms of certification? Guy's timeline laid it out pretty well. If you take the extra time, the extra whatever it's going to be four years [more] that it's going to take the 777-9 to finally enter service after its first flight compared to the other Boeing programs, a lot of that dovetails with what's going on in the certification environment now.

The 777-9 is the first... Well, depending on how you define it, it's certainly one of the first airplanes to go through the meat of its FAA certification program under some new protocols. They are numerous, everything from human factors validations, requirements that EASA wants talking about the common core system, basically the computer brains of the airplane. The FAA and the EASA differed on basically redundancy and what constituted redundancy. They've come to an agreement, and EASA won out.

So numerous issues. The thrust-link issue has just added to it. The interesting thing about the thrust-link issue from my perspective is that it sounds like the latest in a long list of problems that Boeing is having. But the feedback I got from people, including some people who you would think would take the opportunity to highlight it as another Boeing problem, have said, "Look, even during FAA certification testing, these things happen." The manufacturer fixes it, brings the solution to the regulator, and you move on.

I asked Mike Whitaker at a recent conference, I asked him about it, and he hasn't missed an opportunity to remind everyone that Boeing needs to dot its I's and cross its T's. On this he said, "On the thrust-link issue, that's why you test the airplanes. They're going to fix it. They're going to bring it back to us." It wasn't another, "Oh, boy, they missed something, and it's another flag that Boeing's quality control or quality assurance is having issues." It was none of that. Similar input from a former FAA certification official who has not been kind to Boeing in the past. He said, "Look, these things happen." He pointed to several other instances, original 777, 757 that had major issues during flight testing, seemingly major issues during flight testing that were corrected.

So what we're seeing now is part of the process of certifying an airplane in terms of the thrust-links, but it's just embedded into a whole bunch of other things at Boeing, including the strike and the layoffs and seemingly a major shakeup that these layoffs are going to bring that are part of new CEO Kelly Ortberg's plan that may or may not have anything to do with the strike. All of it's together, but in some ways these are separate and parallel issues that Boeing is dealing with: restructuring, trying to get the labor force back, and trying to get three airplanes certified by the FAA, counting the two MAXs that are in the process, too.

Joe Anselmo:      

 Speaking of the strike, the strike by the Boeing machinists has just hit the one-month mark. That can't be helping this either. How much is this program going to be affected if that strike goes on?

Sean Broderick:     

 The 777-9 certification, I have not seen a breakdown of who was getting the rolling furloughs, and obviously, I have no idea who's wrapped up in the 10% layoffs that are coming over the next several months. I would be stunned if Boeing is furloughing people that are key to getting the MAX 7, the MAX 10 and the 777-9 certified Stunned. Now, is it possible? I suppose. In the interest of fairness, you have a rolling furlough for everybody who can be furloughed. But I think the bigger issue is the technical issue of solving the problem and convincing the FAA that the problem is solved and then getting its ducks back in a row and flying the airplane.

If the strike goes on long enough, obviously... People who are on strike did a lot of things besides build airplanes. They maintain the ones that are in storage, and Boeing has a pretty good inventory now. So it's going to have some impact on the programs. Even with the 787, it'll have some impact on that, even though those employees aren't directly affected. Basically, any problem with those airplanes that had to be dealt with in Puget Sound was dealt with by machinists, have some impact.

But this is more about the issues we have been seeing in terms of Boeing's struggles to adjust to the new certification environment. Same with the FAA, they're doing some things for the first time. In many cases, they're doing them together. They're trying to figure out how these new processes are going to work that Congress has mandated and FAA has said, "This is what we're going to do." It's going to take a full development cycle before the industry understands it, and that will tell us if these extra years are just part of the adjustment or if they're part of the new reality.

Joe Anselmo:   

 Guy Norris had mentioned EASA, the FAA's counterpart in Europe. Where does the EASA fit in all this?

Sean Broderick:    

 On the 777-9, they are the validating authority. So in theory, the FAA decides what meets the regulations and EASA validates what the FAA has done. Again, very simple explanation. Since the 737 MAX, two accidents, and then the revalidation of the changes to the MCAS software and everything that went along with that, EASA's certainly been more diligent about going over some of the things that Boeing is doing. In the case of the 777-9, there were some differences in the certification requirements and the Part 25 requirements, some. Usually they get worked out. In this case, they did get worked out. But EASA's are a little more stringent in terms of how they define redundancy.

On an overly simplistic way, Boeing has been able to take the same box, put three of them on the airplane, and call it redundant. EASA wants the boxes with the same function but made by different suppliers, and that's what they call redundancy. They've done it that way for a long time. The FAA has said, "No. As long as you have three of the same, not a problem." EASA's concern is the same fault could disrupt three of the same boxes. As EASA says, "I want three that function the same way, but I want them to be fundamentally different." Again, extremely overly simplistic explanation, but that is one of the main issues that they had to work through on the 777-9. EASA won, which means the assumption is that Boeing is going to deliver all the airplanes certified to the EASA spec because that's the only way the customers that are outside of the US are going to be able to use them. A lot of them do rely on the EASA regulations. It's going to mean extra issues when it comes to sourcing spares and all that, but that's for another day.

Joe Anselmo:       

Guy, we're running out of time, but I wanted to ask you, the 777X program reminds me a little bit of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which, as you know, was plagued by huge cost overruns, years of delay. But when it finally got into space and started yielding these incredible images, everyone forgot about all that. Do you think that's going to be the same thing with this aircraft when it finally gets into service?

Guy Norris:                

I was just thinking that, Joe. When you look at the development program, things like the innovations like this very high aspect ratio wing and, of course, these massive folding wing tips, once they got over the integration issues of building the wing, the aerodynamic performance of this thing seems to be delivering to what it says. It's going to be up to 20% better than the 777-300, that sort of ballpark. It's really what Dan said: You couldn't have a better dramatic leap in performance at a better time, particularly for these longer-range requirements, slot-constrained routes. You don't have any choice really. It's going to be the 777X family for the future.

So I think you're right once we look back on this as a nightmare time for them. But the airlines won't be able to get them quickly enough. That's my thought, particularly at that high end of the market. There's just nothing else that's going to compete with it. Then sadly, for Boeing, of course, it's going to take them a long time to recoup the costs of this. They even took a $6.5 billion charge way back in 2021. That was over three years ago when they actually did that. It's what the market needs. They're going to make money out of it, but it's going to take an awful long time.

Joe Anselmo:     

Okay, I'd like to thank all three of you for sharing your insights. Dan, congratulations to you for getting another annual forecast to the finish line. It's a huge, huge project and really great work, so we appreciate it. For now, that is a wrap for this week's Check 6. A special thanks to our podcast editor in London, Guy Ferneyhough. To our listeners, thank you for your time, and join us again next week when Guy Norris will be back here to talk about unexplained aerial phenomenon or, as some would call them, UFOs. Until then, have a great week.

Announcer:        

Get face-to-face with Aerospace M&A leadership on November 12th at the Aviation Week A&D Mergers & Acquisitions conference taking place in Los Angeles. Learn what's hot and what's not and understand the implications of the upcoming elections. Register at events.aviationweek.com and use the promo code check6 to save 20%.