Boeing 787 all-composite aircraft

Brief comparison — Boeing's Dreamliner program cited as an example of a single product launch that could bankrupt a $5–60 billion enterprise if it goes wrong. Parallel to Bethlehem's Burns Harbor bet.

Gordon and a few other people around the world realized this, and they started what they called mini mills. Instead of a steel mill as big as — well, the last steel mill built in this country was the Bethlehem Steel Burns Harbor plant, from 1965 to 1972. It took 7 years to construct, it cost Bethlehem $5 billion. Bethlehem was the second largest steel company in the world at the time. They started the Burns Harbor plant, which is still in operation. It almost bankrupted them. I think they were only about $5 billion a year in sales, and so they were spending a lot of money on capital. It'd be equivalent today of Intel having to spend $20 billion to build a fab plant, or a $60 billion fab plant. It can bankrupt a company if things don't go right. Or Boeing deciding to build a Dreamliner — it can bankrupt the company if it doesn't come out properly.

Drawing-board ambition was 100% composite; final delivery was 50% composite by weight. Internal structure (ribs, keel beam) still aluminum and titanium because composites would cost a small fortune; skin is carbon fiber. The engineering reason composites stop at the skin.

So the 737 was essentially an all-aluminum airplane. The 777 was going to be all composite when they put it on the drawing board and made the pitch to the Board of Directors. When they finally finished, it was 12 percent. By the way, the guy in charge of the 777 program was Alan Mulally, an MIT grad — actually a Sloan fellow, but close enough — and then he became chairman of Ford. So they never hit all-composite aircraft. When they got to the 787, they decided it was going to be a hundred percent.

~80% composite by weight; three years late on a three-year plan because of manufacturing-base maturation challenges. Used as the eventual realization of what the 777 program had to back away from.

I sometimes in my pejorative way say composites are the materials of the future — they always have been and they always will be the material of the future. They are starting to find their own. The 787 is like 80% composites by weight. However, it was also about three years late on a three-year development plan, so it took six years to develop it, in part because of all the problems of developing a manufacturing base for making composites reliably.

787 reached ~80% composite, where 777 had been forced down to 30% composite for cost reasons. Cited as Boeing finally committing to the all-composite vision they'd backed away from on the 777.

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.

Twenty years after the 777 attempt, the 787 made it to a fair amount of composites, but with lots of problems. One-line reference.

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.

Dave's anchor case for carbon fiber composites — 50% composite by weight on the 787 and Airbus A350. Used to set up the unidirectional-strength / thermoset-irreversibility / cost-reduction discussion that follows.

One more story about materials. Most of my time right now is spent with carbon fiber reinforced plastics, which is a really interesting snapshot into the value-added side of Tom's slide. Fifty percent of the weight of a Dreamliner 787 is some form of composite material. It's interesting to realize that you're flying on a plastic plane. Most people think about plastics as being not very durable, not highly structural, but when you fly on an Airbus A350 or a Boeing 787, you're flying on a vessel that is 50% by weight composite materials. Composite materials have some attributes. They're lightweight, their strength-to-weight ratio is very good. It happens to be unidirectional, unless you do something to obviate the unidirectionality, because it's made by fibers in a matrix. The way I have to get around that and make it more isotropic is to lay my fabric, my fibers, up in different patterns so that I get more isotropic behavior. The plastic matrix that's used is an epoxy — a thermoset. When you're processing materials that are thermosets, you better not make a mistake, because what you wind up with is a lot of very expensive scrap. You can't reprocess a thermoset.