After a two-year delay, the composite-material Boeing 787 Dreamliner finally takes to the sky.
The new Boeing 787 jetliner finally took off Tuesday. This was the long-delayed inaugural flight of the world’s first airliner made from lightweight composite materials.
This will be the first of many flights from Everett’s Paine Field over Washington state, needed to complete extensive Federal Aviation Administration certification testing.
The flight lasted about three hours. Deteriorating weather forced a landing about an hour earlier than planned, but Boeing must be happy to see this bird in the air.
According to ATW Daily News, the pilots had nothing but praise for the aircraft at a follow-up press conference.
“We figured out more things about this aircraft after 10 minutes of flying than we had in the last 100 days” of ground testing, Chief Pilot Michael Carriker said at a news conference after landing aircraft ZA001 at a rainy Boeing Field in Seattle a little more than 3 hr. after it took off from Paine Field in Everett. The manufacturer had hoped to keep the aircraft in the air for more than 5 hr. “There was a lot of climbing, turning, descending to avoid weather,” Copilot Randall Neville said.
The 787 did not go higher than 15,000 ft. and only about half the planned tests were achieved owing to the weather, but the pilots noted that conditions allowed them to test how it handled turbulence and constant course corrections. “It was a busy flight, but the airplane handled fine,” Neville said. “We had to contend with weather out there today and there were no surprises . . .At times, it was almost second-hand. The airplane [performed] exactly as we expected.”
The launch customer is ANA. They are expecting the first production version in late 2010.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
