Here, there are main comments made by Teal Group Vice President Analysis Richard Aboulafia:
About the 787 manufacturing process:
Richard Aboulafia said "that most likely the problem is somewhere in the
manufacturing process. The 787, like most other commercial aircraft, is
not assembled in one place. [...] When you put a manufacturing process in
place that involves a large numbers of procedures, you might not have
that right [...] If you’re not in a good workflow, then some
mistakes are going to make it through the system.
It's clear one of the
problems was building planes before fully understanding the rhythm of
production.
There are many new technologies in this plane, so inevitably there will
be many glitches [...] There’s a lot of innovation and the FAA is going to check it very thoroughly."
About the Boeing brand:
"It's just a question of how quickly they can get all the onboard
technologies right, and whether or not the 787 and Boeing brands will be
badly damaged.
Put the words 'fire' and 'new
jetliner' together in a sentence and you're bound to scare travelers and
airlines. Boeing will be able to make this situation right, but they
need to act fast to avoid serious problems with customers.
We're getting to a tipping point, where they go from needing to rectify problems to doing major damage control to the image of the company and the plane [...] While they delivered a large and unexpected number of 787s last year, it's possible that they should have instead focused on identifying glitches and flaws, rather than pushing ahead with volume production.
There’s no reason to suspect this plane is being unsafe, but it’s important to review procedures, technology and manufacturing in light of what’s happened.
The decade-old 787
project has been plagued with problems and delays. The
current woes, while embarrassing, are no worse than it’s been for them
for the past five years or so."
