Boeing has given a new timeline for its 787 Dreamliner aircraft to resume deliveries, after almost a year of being halted due to nose defects found by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
According to several sources who spoke to Reuters, the jets are expected to begin delivery in the latter half of 2022.
In early July last year, the FAA discovered another manufacturing issue on the wide-body jets during a system-wide inspection of the planemaker’s shimming process. It came only months after the 787’s resumed operations in March 2021.
The regulator found a defect near the nose on certain Dreamliners in the company’s undelivered inventory, which led to the pause in deliveries.
It followed a similar issue less than a year before at the time in September 2020 when two manufacturing issues were found in fuselage sections of eight Dreamliners.
The delays have created a major backlog of aircraft orders for Boeing and has affected multiple airlines who have been forced to cut capacity to mitigate the undelivered jets.
In January, deliveries of the 787 jets were expected to finally resume in April, but now the timestamp has been pushed back to May, and likely longer, according to the sources.
Over 100 jets are still undertaking inspections and repairs, and a Boeing spokesperson told Reuters: “As we’ve said, we are taking the time needed to ensure conformance to our exacting specifications.”
The spokesperson declined to comment when deliveries would begin again, as the American planemaker has stopped proposing deadlines due to the continuous changes.
According to an FAA spokesperson, “safety dictates the timeline” and the regulator is retaining authority until the agency is confident Boeing is manufacturing aircraft that meet their standards, and when the company “has a robust plan for the re-work that it must perform on a large volume of new 787s in storage”.
In January, Boeing reported a US$3.5 billion loss in the final three months of 2021 due to the delays, which led to the company losing a total US$4.2 billion for the quarter.
It came after two years of continuous losses for the company, amid the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.
In February this year, American Airlines confirmed it was forced to suspend flights from certain US, UK and Australian routes from 5 May, in light of ongoing delivery delays on its fleet of Boeing 787 Dreamliners.
In a regulatory filing in the US, the carrier said that Boeing had delayed deliveries of its new 787 Dreamliner jets, with the airline now planning to accept only 10 of the 13 Dreamliners it had scheduled for delivery this year. The remaining three aircraft will be delivered next year.
The delayed deliveries forced American to slim down its flight schedule for the northern hemisphere summer season, with flights temporarily suspended between LA and Sydney, as well as Seattle and London, and Dallas and Santiago.
A United Airlines spokesperson told analysts it originally expected to take delivery of eight 787 Dreamliners in the first half of last year, but the date has been moved to after summer of 2022.
