It's truly a beautiful, graceful wing.
First flight is supposed to be next year, in 2016, production to begin in 2017 and first delivery by 2020. The 8X is designed to carry 350 pax and have a range of more than 9,300 nautical miles. The 9 x will support 400 pax with a range of more than 8,200 nautical miles. 300 hundred from 6 customers thus far.
The first steel rising at Boeing's $1 billion 777X wing factory (Video)
Feb 3, 2015, 1:43pm PST Updated: Feb 4, 2015, 4:13pm PST
Boeing's 1.3-million-square-foot 777X wing plant will dwarf the people working there, as they produce carbon composite spars and skins for the company's next new big aircraft.
In the foreground, you can see where crews have begun erecting steel walls on the west edge of the Boeing 777X site. Other trusses are laid out, positioned for placement by the many cranes on the site. Boeing's large Everett office buildings can be seen in the background.
Construction has started at
Boeing's $1 billion 777X wing plant, after months of site preparation and thousands of dump truck trips.
The first steel is tangible evidence of the rapid progress Boeing (NYSE: BA) is making on the Everett building, which will be a cornerstone of the 777X's advanced wing technology.
The building itself will be the largest single manifestation of Washington state's win of the 777X jet assembly. Boeing
broke ground on the facility in a ceremony on Oct. 21.
New aerial photos show the first steel frameworks for the walls on the west side of the 1.3-million-square-foot structure, while large yellow cranes prepare to lift other steel truss structures into place.
The images show the vast size of the structure's footprint, dwarfing the Everett site headquarters buildings to the east.
Until recently the wing building site was primarily a sea of mud and dirt, with lines of dump trucks bringing in about 530,000 cubic yards of fill dirt to make the site level. Now that the site is moving into construction mode, the steel and walls will be rising rapidly.
The building will be the largest single structure under construction in Washington state this year. At its peak, the construction will employ 1,200 people, and consume 31,000 tons of steel and 170,000 tons of concrete.
When the new wing building is completed in 2016, workers will start fabricating the central parts of the 777X's new carbon composite wings there.
These wing structures will include skins and spars, primarily laid up by automated carbon tape-laying machines, and then cured in one of the facility's three 120-foot autoclaves. These are giant pressurized ovens that convert the fiber structures into finished parts.
The parts will then be assembled into wings in the adjacent aircraft assembly plant, and integrated into assembly of the 777X, a newer version of Boeing's largest twin-engine jet.
Deciding to build the wing in Everett was a massive about-face for Boeing, which a decade ago decided to let a Japanese contractor build the wings for the 787 Dreamliner.
While the 777X wing is
in most ways an upscaled version of the 787 wing, except for the 777X wing's folding wingtips, the company decided that carbon composites was an area where it needed to lead the technology.
COO
Dennis Muilenburg addressed this point in response to a question at the Credit Suisse Global Industrials Conference in New York City, Dec. 3.
"The composite wing, we have decided to pull back into Boeing," he said. "We believe complex composites manufacturing is a capability we need to have internally."
