WHAT ON EARTH is Going on with the Boeing 777X?!

- It really feels like Boeing just can't catch a break nowadays. Its newest and biggest airliner, the 777X, seemed to be progressing nicely through testing this summer until a new problem stopped it in its tracks. - This morning Boeing is pausing tests of its new 777X after finding damage to the plane. - So what happened? What caused the plane certification program to freeze again? How bad is it and what's even the point of the 777X? Stay tuned. (playful chime) For some time now, I've been wanting to make a video with an update for you guys on the Boeing 777X project. The reason that I wanted to do that was because there have been quite a few interesting developments in it over the past few months and most of these have been positive. So the plan I originally had was to make this a feel-good Boeing story. But as it turns out, that just wasn't meant to be. - In another setback for Boeing, the companay just grounded its fleet of the 777X test planes. - As we record this, the 777X fleet is again grounded, which is doubly frustrating for a program that has been dragging on for such a very, very long time. Just to put this into perspective, the original Boeing 777 was launched in October of 1990. It flew for the first time in 1994 and it then entered service in June of 1995. This means that it went from project launch to carrying paying passengers in less than five years. Now the Boeing 777X is a pretty comprehensive update to the original 777 as I will explain shortly. But even so, you would think that as this is an update, it would be quicker to develop, right? Well, no. Not even close. When Boeing launched it in 2013, they thought that the first 777X variant would get certified in 2019 and then enter service either in the same year or in 2020. That's seven years, so two more years than the legacy 777. But obviously that didn't happen. The most recent estimate was that Boeing hoped to get the plane delivered towards the end of 2025 with a service entry in early 2026. If that would happen, it would mean that it has taken, from launch in 2013 to service entry in 2026, 13 years, well over twice as long as it took to get the original 777 up and into production. In fact, just the delays to the program so far are longer than the original 777 development time and I'm saying so far because these estimates were before the latest problems that were discovered in August. But before I get into that, why is Boeing developing the 777X in the first place? What's the point of it? Well, Boeing designed the original 777 to address a part of the market that, until then, at least, was just a small niche, long distance flights with relatively few passengers, something that today is known in the industry as long and thin routes. Previously, Boeing had built a smaller version of the 747 for this role, which they called the 747SP. And while that aircraft made sense for some distant city pairs, it had four engines, obviously, meaning that its economics was never good enough to make it wildly popular. Now Boeing considered updating the 747SP with newer engines, which they had already fitted to other 747s, but when the airlines rejected that idea, they actually thought of creating a new aircraft with three engines, like the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 or the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar. But by that point, Boeing had also gained good experience with their first ever twin-engine widebody, the 767, and there was no question that a twin-engine aircraft would have overall much better economics for all destinations than a similarly-sized three or four-engine jet. Boeing also soon figured out that such an aircraft would suit not just these long and thin routes, but basically every route with enough passenger demand to fill the aircraft and that could potentially open up a whole new segment of long and thin routes. Hence, the Boeing 777 was born. Now to a lot of us aviation enthusiasts, this aircraft was Boeing's finest hour, and that wasn't just because of its speedy development, which was fast even by the standards of the early 1990s, the 777 was also a very advanced design overall. It was, for example, Boeing's first ever aircraft with fly-by-wire controls. Its huge engines were just as new, and it entered service with a, for the time, incredible three hour ETOPS approval, which meant that the plane and its engines were thought to be reliable enough to fly huge distances, three hours away from the nearest airport. In later years, the 777 family also grew with a longer fuselage, newer engines, and updates to its wing and landing gear. The definitive passenger variant of the evolved 777 family was the 777-300ER, which also has been the best seller of all 777 variants to date. Now depending on the airline, the 300ER can carry between 350 to slightly over 400 passengers, which means that when it entered service, it was big enough to actually replace its bigger sister, the Boeing 747, for some airlines. But not for all. And that's where the latest generation, the 777X, comes in. The first of these to enter service will be the 777-9, which is about 2.9 meters, or 9.5 feet longer than the 300ER. Its higher capacity and range will now make it a direct replacement for the 747, suitable for basically any airline that are still flying passengers with the Queen of the Skies. A smaller variant, the 777-8, will then likely replace the 777-300ER, although it's actually a little bit smaller than the 300. But Boeing doesn't see that as a problem. They expect some of the 300ER users to just choose the bigger 777-9 instead, following the general upscaling trend in the industry. Finally, Boeing is also developing a freighter, called the 777-8 Foxtrot, to compete directly against the freighter version of Airbus's A350. And in fact, the Airbus A350 was actually a key factor in Boeing's decision to launch the whole 777X program in the first place. You see, Airbus hoped that the Airbus A350-1000, the largest variant of this type, would steal existing users of the 777-300ER. And initially, Airbus had wanted to make the Airbus A350 by just updating the A330 with a new wing and engines. But the A330 was, by then, getting old. Its fuselage came from the A300, which had entered service already in the 1970s, meaning that it had already been updated once. In the end, Airbus went with a completely new design, but by contrast, Boeing's 777 was at that point still relatively new, and its design was really popular with both the airlines, passengers and the pilots. So keeping the 777's fuselage and just updating it with newer engines and a completely new composite wing made total sense, if Boeing wanted to compete with the Airbus A350. So essentially, that's what the 777X is, a lengthened, re-engined, re-winged 777, a replacement for the Boeing 747 and an answer to the Airbus A350-1000. That new wing that fitted to it is also quite a bit longer, giving it a bigger aspect ratio, which makes it more efficient, but that's also why it needs those signature folding wing tips. You see, in-flight, the 777X has a wingspan of 71.75 meters, or 235.4 feet. But that wingspan would, on the ground, require the 777X to use the same gates as a 747 or an Airbus A380, which are ICAO category F gates. That would cost the airlines using it a lot more money, and the extra width would also cause some taxiway limitations. The solution? Those cool folding wing tips, which are 3.5 meters or 11 feet long, and when folded, they allow the 777X to use the same ICAO category E gates, as well as the same taxiways as the existing 777. In order to produce this beast, Boeing built a completely new composite wing facility in Washington State, and General Electric developed the GE9X, a monster of a turbofan engine whose cowling has a larger diameter than the fuselage of the 737 that I fly. But as I mentioned before, Boeing has suffered a lot of setbacks in the project so far. When the Farnborough Air Show opened its doors this year, the only notable exhibit related to the 777X was by Liebherr, who is the maker of those awesome folding wing tips. But at least this time, the absence of the 777X flight display at the Air Show was for a positive reason. Boeing was finally busy test-flying the aircraft with the FAA. I'll get more into those tests in a second, but just when I was researching for this episode, I was hit by the news that these tests had been abruptly stopped and that the whole test fleet was grounded. Obviously, that raised some immediate and serious questions about the project's development and what it would mean for Boeing's customers. So as soon as I heard those news, I wanted to get a comprehensive understanding of the problem and what was actually at stake. So I turned to Ground News, today's sponsor and my go-to source for getting the full story on any breaking news from as many angles as possible. As it turns out, there were more than 100 stories published about this grounding worldwide and Ground News brought together all of those viewpoints into one place. That made it super obvious how different sources with different viewpoints skewed the information. Like the US-based Daily Caller, who was noting how Boeing had once claimed that the grounded jet would be unmatched in every aspect of performance, whilst sources in Germany instead focused on how this would impact the industry as a whole. Without access to all of those perspectives, I would get just a partial understanding of the story and that's why Ground News is so awesome. Their app and website gives more insight into any given story than a single article ever could. That includes Boeing and aviation. They even show blind spot stories that are not widely-covered by the rest of the media. When I read your comments, it's obvious how frustrated you sometimes are with the sensationalism and lack of knowledge that is sometimes shown by the mainstream media and to combat that, Ground News is the best tool that I've found so far. But don't take my word for it. Use the link here below, which is ground.news/mentour or scan this QR code to check them out. And if you use this code, you will get 40% off the Vantage plan for unlimited access. Thank you, Ground News. Now where was I? Ah yeah, Farnborough and those FAA test flights. At the Farnborough Airshow, Boeing and Qatar Airways announced a new order for 20 new 777-9s. And with these, Qatar now has orders for a total of 60 777-9s plus 34 777-8 Foxrot freighters. So that was really good news for Boeing, who generally did well at Farnborough. And they'd also served as a nice follow-up to an even bigger and better story from earlier in July when the FAA granted the 777-9 with its Type Inspection Authorization or TIA. The TIA is a list of in-flight tests that an aircraft has to pass successfully in order to prove that it can enter service safely. Basically, the TIA is an extremely-detailed checklist, which forms a key step in the certification of any new airliner. This process is done by the FAA, with either FAA pilots flying the plane or with each step of the process completed with FAA personnel on board, observing and verifying the process. That was the reason we didn't get to see any of those 777-9s flying over Farnborough this year. They were all busy completing the TIA program. The FAA customizes the TIA program for each aircraft that it evaluates, and that customization is based on the aircraft's characteristics and any new systems or features that is introduced with it. For example, with the 777X, those folding wingtips meant that the FAA had to issue new requirements in order to ensure that the pilots have the necessary procedures to operate them safely. As The Air Current explained in detail, and you should definitely check them out if you haven't already by the way, before takeoff the 777X pilots will initially taxi with the wingtips folded on their way out towards the runway. They will then be kept folded until they reach a predetermined point, where the taxiways is wide enough to extend the wingtips, and the pilots will obviously also have a wingtips-extended check item in their electronic checklists. The process of actually extending the wingtips takes around 20 seconds to do, and if the pilots somehow forget to extend them, or there is a malfunction with the system, a warning will light up in their engine indication and crew-alerting system, EICAS, to make sure that the aircraft can never take off with the wingtips folded. After landing, the wingtips will start folding automatically once the speed drops below 50 knots, and if that doesn't happen, another EICAS message will tell the pilots to fold them manually. All of these things and procedures have to be tested thoroughly, and the TIA also has to account for things like how the folded wingtips will affect ground handling during strong crosswinds, for example. Obviously, it's normal for new aircraft designs to introduce new features, usually for better efficiency or to improve ergonomics, which is why there is no fixed duration of testing or a specific amount of flight hours to determine when the TIA process can start. The FAA just doesn't begin the process until they are satisfied that the test aircraft is ready for it, and the amount of time needed between the first ever flight of a new type and the start of the TIA flight testing has lately been increasing a lot. According to Aviation Week, which published a very detailed outline of this process, when the original 777 flew for the first time in 1994, it got its TIA just one month later, which explains how Boeing managed to get it certified and delivered to customers so quickly. But when Boeing certified the 787 in 2009, the TIA only came after a full eight months of in-house flight testing, and the 777-9 flew for the first time in January of 2020 and has just got its TIA approval now, four years and five months later. So why did it take that long? Well, some of you might know that the 777X program had some very early problems with its engines and its fuselage. But to be clear here, those problems happened before even the first flight of the aircraft and therefore shouldn't really have played a role in the delays in getting that TIA. Boeing originally applied for the TIA of the 777-9 in 2021, but the FAA just simply rejected that application since they decided that the aircraft still wasn't mature enough as a design to be ready for it. And why was that then? Well, it was quite clear that the FAA was applying the hard lessons that they had learned from the 737 MAX disasters. So in this case, they were doing a lot of work more directly, rather than just relying on Boeing's own employees. And in this case, it seems like they quickly took issue with several different areas in Boeing's original submission. They were, for example, not happy with the way that Boeing had transferred some systems directly from the 787 to the new 777-9. In theory, this should have been a relatively straightforward thing, because the 787 already shared a lot of systems and even a pilot type rating with the original 777, but not so this time. The FAA also wanted to see improvements in the redundancy of some involved systems, and they also wanted Boeing to comply with newer requirements related to human factors and various lessons on behavior of pilots in critical situations. So that process took a lot of additional time, and after the 737 MAX crashes, it wasn't just the FAA that was paying more attention. Other regulators around the world were now also closely involved in the certification process, effectively adding their own requirements in some cases. And there is even more to this story, like how Boeing lost even more time when they decided to switch engineers and other resources from the 777-9 to the still-uncertified 737 MAX models during the past few years, as their priorities kind of flip-flopped between these two types. But in any case, finally, the coveted TIA came, and Boeing really wanted to get the process right on their first attempt here. That was important, because if this FAA flight testing program would go through smoothly, Boeing could probably greatly improve its chances of speeding up the same process with the remaining 777X variants, the 777-8 and the 8F. So they went all in and used three out of their total four 777-9s for these flight tests, switching between aircrafts as the program progressed. And then, on the 15th of August this year, the crew of Whiskey Hotel 003, the third 777-9 test aircraft, landed back on Runway 17 in Hawaii's Kona Airport, after a five-and-a-half- hour-long test flight. This aircraft has registration November 779 Xray Yankee, and when the test program is over, it is destined to enter service with Lufthansa. But as I'm recording this video, that aircraft hasn't flown again since that last flight, and actually none of the four 777-9s have. The reason for this was that after the flight, Boeing's ground crew found a broken thrust link connected to one of the aircraft's engines, and that prompted Boeing's engineers to also examine all of the rest of the 777-9 fleet. And unfortunately, during those subsequent checks, Boeing found that there were cracks in more engine thrust links, fitted to the rest of the 777-9 test fleet as well. Now we don't know how many more of these cracks there were, and it doesn't really matter, it's abundantly clear that this is a problem that Boeing needs to both understand and fix. So what is a thrust link then? Well this is a structure that is part of how the engine is attached to the wing pylon of an aircraft. Its purpose is to carry the thrust load from the engine itself to the pylon, and then onto the rest of the aircraft. I've done many videos on this channel looking at how jet engines work, and in them I have explained that while modern turbofan engines generate some thrust from the exhaust gases coming out of the turbine in the rear, most of the thrust actually comes from the fan itself at the very front. So because the thrust is generated in different parts of the engine, great care must be taken to ensure that those thrust loads created at different thrust levels don't end up pulling the engine apart. Now here I want you to take a moment to consider just how much force these engine attachments can be subjected to. Each of the two GE9X engines of the 777X generates 110,000 pounds or 489 kilonewtons of thrust, which normally pulls the plane forward. But if one of those engines would go to idle or even shut down while the airplane is at speed, that huge engine will instead start to generate insane amounts of drag, pushing it backwards instead. Or even worse, if an engine eats up a couple of birds when it's operating at a high thrust setting, that can lead to compressor stalls, and that could mean that the engine will go from full power to zero and then back again many times per second. In reality all of this is even more complicated because during that brief bang portion of a compressor stall, the fan at the front is actually still spinning and therefore, generating some thrust, while the core isn't. And of course, there will also be heavy vibrations in basically all directions, which components like the thrust links have to be able to endure. Frankly, I don't even really claim to fully understand all of the complexities of this and the insane engineering behind it, but I think you can see why a part like a thrust link or actually thrust links, because there's two of them per engine, have big roles to play here in order to both keep the engine in one piece and keep it connected to the pylon and the rest of the aircraft. In the case of Boeing's 777-9 in Hawaii, the second thrust link still held up, keeping the engine safely attached to the jet. And the two links are mounted at slightly different angles, but they're designed so that each of them can take up the full amount of that enormous thrust load from the engine. And crucially for this story, even though the engines are obviously made by General Electric, the thrust link structure is designed by Boeing. Now as far as we know, the design of these thrust links is definitely not unique to the GE9X engines. Actually most of the pictures of thrust links that I've shown you so far are from other engines, like the GEnx of the 787 or the GE90 of the original 777, but these two are actually from the GE9X though. Obviously the sheer size and power of the new GE9X engines meant that these parts had to be redesigned and Boeing are now working on how and why they failed and also if they need to redesign them. And they have obviously also notified the FAA and their airline customers about this problem and what that might mean. Boy, I am happy I didn't have to be the one that made those phone calls. You see, customers like Emirates, Lufthansa and Qatar really want their 777-9s as quickly as possible because compared to a 777-300ER, the 777-9 burns about 13% less fuel. That's pretty amazing, especially considering that the 300ER itself was around 10% more efficient than the very first 777 that hit the market. But like I mentioned before, some of these airlines want the 777-9 to replace their older 747-400s. And compared to that, four-engine jet, the 777-9 has an incredible 33% lower fuel burn. But until Boeing comes up with a fix for these thrust links, we won't know how much this will further delay the 777X. Time will tell. What do you think though? Let me know in the comments below. Now, make sure to check out our sponsor if you want to keep an unbiased view of what's going on around you and you can also support me and the channel by joining my fantastic Patreon crew. Have an absolutely fantastic day wherever you are and I'll see you next time. Bye bye!