Months may transpire before Boeing is able to do what it failed to accomplish in the last week of June - fly the 787 for the first time - following the revelation that the new airplane's composite wing induced delamination and deformation on body join points during a routine preflight stress test.

The company says it will take at least several weeks of data analysis before it will know how long it must delay first flight, which had been expected to take place by June 30. Also of concern is how close it can come to meeting its promise to launch customer All Nippon Airways to deliver its first aircraft in the first quarter of 2010.

Disclosure of the side-of-body stress failure on a June 23 conference call came as flight-test aircraft ZA001 was completing its final gauntlet systems tests and preparing for taxi tests that would set it up for first flight. Despite the test failure, those preparations will proceed, says Boeing Vice President Pat Shanahan, general manager of airplane programs. He predicts that once a design to strengthen the wing-body join area is tested and verified, installation can be accomplished on the flight line, avoiding a time-consuming return to the factory floor.

But it is not clear how much of Boeing's beleaguered schedule for the standard sized 787-8 will be eaten up by the delay. A senior analyst and engineer with knowledge of Boeing's programs points out that recovery from what appears to be very bad design failures sometimes happens in a matter of weeks. However, that has not been Boeing's experience on the 787. This is the sixth time first flight has been pushed back. Many of the previous announcements were adjustments to additional bad news that negated earlier optimistic estimates (see timeline below).

Boeing Commercial Airplanes President and CEO Scott Carson says, "We will correct the situation with both care and urgency."

Since Boeing first began announcing delays in September 2007, Wall Street has been growing increasingly skeptical of the company's predictive powers. Citing the program's "track record for continual negative discovery," Morgan Stanley analyst Heidi Wood expects a first-flight delay of 3-6 months, putting it as far back as the fourth quarter of 2009, assuming there are no further problems. First delivery is estimated for 2011.

The concern over the unexpected wing stress failure centers not on the test results themselves, but on the fact that Boeing's computer-aided design did not predict them. The design software is not suspect; the data and models that were fed into it are.

Discrepancies between designs and actual tests are nothing new. Nor is this the first problem the 787 program has had with software development. Software at the systems level is one reason the program has run late.

But those issues have been resolved. The trouble here is that the design discrepancy appeared so late in the preflight program. "If they had had the right configuration data/models in the system, they would have found [the problem] earlier" and been able to correct it, the analyst and engineer says.

Boeing Vice President and 787 General Manager Scott Fancher agrees. "If we had found it a couple of months ago, we wouldn't be having this phone call," he commented. Instead, Boeing and its supply team would have identified a stiffener fix, installed it and the flight-test program would have been unaffected.