Boeing 777 advanced composites program

What's the best material of all? Steel. You need to learn this answer. Steel. Titanium is pretty good but it's a little pricey. Aluminum is way down here, and it's actually about the same as composites, which is why there is sort of a trade-off in aircraft structure design between aluminum and composites. However, when they first started building the Boeing 777 — like 20, 25 years ago — they announced it was going to be more than half composites. When it was finally built it was like 10 or 15 percent composites. Does anyone know what happened? They priced it out, just like the X-33 space plane. Those composites are expensive. We're going to talk about that. But they have equal fracture toughness and strength as aluminum, they're nowhere near titanium or steel.

Cited as the "$20 billion bet-your-company" precedent. Drawing-board ambition was 100% composite; final delivery was 12% composite (in the nacelle).

We can take an aerospace example and look at the last few aircraft Boeing has built. They started with the 707 and the 727, which no longer exists, and the 737, which still exists but was completely redesigned in the late 80s, early 90s. The 737 of today is not the same as the 737 of 1975. The Boeing 777, which was started around 1990, was said to be a twenty-billion-dollar investment by one company. This is a bet-your-company project.

Originally planned for 80–90% composite; reduced because the V-22-style economics didn't scale to commercial aviation. The $188-per-pound-saved Boeing internal figure (vs. the industry guess of $200) is the cost-analysis anchor.

The 777 was supposed to be 80, 90% composite until Boeing started to design it in the early '90s, and they found they couldn't afford the composites for commercial aircraft. The Osprey was a military aircraft, and you start figuring out what the V-22 Osprey costs on a dollars-per-pound basis, it's probably up in the thousands of dollars a pound range, which you could not afford for a commercial aircraft.

Originally intended as all-composite; cost-engineered down to 30% composite, 70% aluminum.

If you've got the market, you don't care too much about inventing a new material. You're happy just going along and not innovating and waiting for someone else to do the innovation. Most big companies are too busy not innovating. Are people familiar with Clayton Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma? Donny, you must know — at Legos, right? You haven't heard of Innovator's Dilemma? So fifteen years ago Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School wrote a book called The Innovator's Dilemma, and he pointed out that big companies are so busy just maintaining the product they've got and trying to improve their high-end business — let's take Boeing as an example, since you are Boeing people. They wanted to make an all-composite aircraft. The 777 originally was going to be all composite, until they started pricing it. They said, oops, we'll never build this one in the next ten years, so they decided it was going to be thirty percent composite and seventy percent aluminum, rather than one hundred percent aluminum. But then when they got to the 787, they said we're really going to do it now, and they did build a 787, and it's about, what, eighty percent composite? It's a huge change. The V-22 Osprey in the 1990s, Bell Boeing, that was a hundred percent composite because it had to be. There wasn't a choice. You're going to pay 60 million dollars for an aircraft that holds 16 people, as opposed to paying 250 million for an aircraft that holds 250 people. So the economics are different for a military aircraft and a commercial aircraft, but you can do it. There have been all kinds of headaches whenever you're the innovator. Mostly people let other smaller companies eat at the bottom of their business, and that's the innovator's dilemma.

The 777 was supposed to be 80% composites; got canned after a couple of years and made mostly aluminum. Professor Gutowski's LFM-program students worked on it. Used to set up Jim Williams's corollary: "we need *cheaper* composites, not better composites."

So if you start thinking about the various properties — sort of like my example of the electrically conductive polymers, they said oh well, they've got a specific electrical conductivity. Yeah, but that's not the figure of merit for the design. People will talk about composites and fancy composites. Professor Gutowski in mechanical engineering — over twenty-five years ago now, when the LFM program first started — had a group of students go to Boeing working on advanced composites. The 777 was supposed to be 80% composites. They canned that after a couple of years and made it mostly aluminum, just like the previous aircraft. The 787 finally, twenty years later, did make it to a fair amount of composites, but there's lots of problems. Professor Gutowski works in environmental things now, but he was working in advanced composites, and he came back and said, I've been working on the wrong thing. He says I've been trying to make better composites. What we need are cheaper composites. Which is sort of Jim Williams's corollary — people have fantastic composites with tremendous strength, but you can't afford them.