A test flight of the first Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft assembled at the Boeing's South Carolina plant in the US was a perfect success, according to Boeing officials and the pilots who flew the plane. This particular plane is likely to be the first to join national carrier Air India's fleet.
"The airplane will now be flown to Texas to be painted with Air India's livery before returning to Boeing's South Carolina plant for a mid-2012 delivery," an official statement from Boeing said.
Air India - whose financial struggles have been compounded by a pilots' strike that has dragged on for around two weeks now - has ordered 27 of these futuristic long-haul aircraft, and delivery of the first is expected from the end of this month, with three Dreamliners expected to be inducted this year.
Private carrier Jet Airways has ordered another 10 Dreamliners.
This is the first Dreamliner built in Boeing's South Carolina plant. Test pilots Tim Berg and Randy Neville flew the plane successfully during the five-hour test flight. However, Neville admitted after the flight that there were a few snags, which needed to be corrected before delivery.
More than 5,000 Boeing employees watched a live broadcast of the aircraft as it took off from Charleston International Airport.
"This is a proud moment for our Boeing South Carolina team and for Boeing," said Jack Jones, vice president and general manager, Boeing South Carolina.
"In April, we gathered on the flight line to watch this plane roll out of final assembly. Today, we watched as this aircraft successfully completed its first production flight - one step closer to delivering our first South Carolina-built 787 Dreamliner to our customer," Jones said.
Boeing, in a statement, said the production flight test profile tested the plane's controls and systems in a series of scenarios designed to verify the plane operates as designed. Wednesday afternoon's skies over Carolina were mostly sunny, the breeze was slight, and the plane flew for more than five hours over the Atlantic Ocean before returning to Charleston International Airport without any major incidents.
Randy Neville, the chief pilot for the 787 programme, said ''we basically flew the plan'' that ''worked out great.''
Neville, who co-piloted the first 787 flight on 15 December 2009, admitted that some fine-tuning was still required before deliveries could start. There were a few issues with the plane that will prompt ''squawks,'' or requests for fixes, Neville said. He declined to detail those defects.
''But they're minor things the team will be able to fix fairly expeditiously,'' he said.
Mike Sinnett, chief project engineer for the 787 programme, quickly interjected, noting that the Dreamliner contains 18 million lines of software code and 70 miles of wiring. Wednesday's flight was ''as clean as a lot of fourth-production flights'', he said. Civil aviation minister Ajit Singh has, meanwhile, cancelled his trip to Seattle and Charleston with ministry and Air India officials to receive the aircraft as was earlier scheduled, due to the crisis in the national carrier.
The minister cancelled the trip "in view of the ongoing problems of Air India, including pilots' strike and passengers' inconvenience," an official statement said. However, officials added that the first aircraft would be inducted into the fleet at the end of this month as scheduled.
The long-haul aircraft, which is made of composite materials like carbon fibre, is portrayed as a fuel-efficient plane that would help slash flying costs significantly due to its lighter weight and non-stop flying capacity.
Boeing has received 896 orders for this aircraft and has so far delivered about 12 of them, mostly to two competing airlines from Japan - Japan Airlines (JAL) and All Nippon Airways (ANA), which were the first customers. As of last year, the list price of a Dreamliner 787 was about $194 million.
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