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> They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that. They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time

The 787 was a straight up MDD pants-on-head plan (pushed by Stonecipher and McDonnel themselves), the entire point was to shift the costs of design and development to suppliers, with the idea that they'd fund the aircraft you could sell.

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The modular structure of the aircraft was also meant to reduce or remove the need for gantry cranes. It required 2- or maybe it was 3-axis forklifts but no gantries. Gantries need tracks and structural support and those make the building the planes are built in quite expensive. I joked at the time that they could buy an old Walmart Superstore and use it to assemble the 787. Though I’m relatively sure they’d crack the concrete.

I have no recollection of whether they stuck with that plan, but I recall the diagrams in the pitch deck.

Nothing really exceptional about that, risk-sharing projects were common in aerospace in the 80s onwards. 21% of the 777 ( yes the beloved Triple Seven ) was farmed out to a Japanese consortium which took risk for the design and production of the fuselage.

But never the wings. That was always Boeing’s. Until MD fucked everything.

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