AirInsight has exclusive detail about MRJ delay

Mitsubishi last month announced a delay of more than one year for the MRJ, but was rather vague about the reason.

AirInsight has the detail, following an interview at the Pratt & Whitney media day attended by officials of the Japanese company in town for the first flight of the MRJ’s PW GTF engine.

19 Comments on “AirInsight has exclusive detail about MRJ delay

  1. Wow, finding a different way to make the parts that is different from the written specs. That’s different.

    • depends on if the parts are production parts, or test parts. If production… that’s a biiiiig problem.

  2. This is how they will eventually become competitive with the established player. This sounds like a valid excuse and a potential threat to others 😉

  3. Looks like they lost configuration control. This is not good. If a part cannot be made easily then the design data must be revised first not last.

    • I agree: not good. It appears MAC lost both configuration control and production control, just about the worst of all possible worlds, as they say both “paperwork” and manufactured parts must be revised.
      It is a real puzzle that a fairly experienced sub-contractor to various manufacturers, with presumably mature manufacturing processes and controls, could allow this to happen.
      If I were those manufacturers I would be looking very closely at MAC parts right now.

    • Isn’t that similar to what Boeing bumped into when they tried to upgrade the 747?
      A lot of small changes from the shopfloor never made it back into relevant documentation.
      Only the FAA never noticed or didn’t force compliance.

      • Do you have a source for your accusation against Boeing and the B-747-8 shop floor? Do you have a source for the FAA being so incompetent as to not notice, or not being able to enforce their own regulations? Or are you just continuing to spru your anti-US and anti-Boeing commentary again?

      • “Or are you just continuing to spru your anti-US and anti-Boeing commentary again?”
        Ohhh, the irony…

  4. I suspect a little bit of the explanation was lost in translation. I’ve been in the MITAC factory, and while I wasn’t there to audit the place, it looked to me like most of the other aircraft and aerostructures factories I’ve been in around the world. My take is that the Japanese regulatory authorities on the case are leaving no tiny pebble unturned for various reasons, some cultural. I expect any number of US contractors would be brought to their knees under the same regimen.

    • BW, I fond your comment extremely interesting. If what you say is true it would be another striking confirmation of the theory of relativity. 😉 As you suggest, the news as reported might have been taken out of context.

      During the period when there were a plethora of different aircraft manufacturers in the US, like Douglas, Rockwell, Grumman, Northrop, Martin, Convair and McDonnell, to name a few, we could find vast cultural differences among them.

      Today the number of players has considerably diminished, and everything is more uniform because everyone is trying to copy what the few others are doing in an effort to remain competitive. Still, there will always remain some fundamental differences, especially if the manufacturers are established in different countries.

  5. If the new parts are interchangeable (direct replacement) with the current parts then the paperwork should be very simple. Of course there is also a question of materials, is the new way of manufacturing producing parts that need to be requalified.

  6. KC135TopBoom :
    Do you have a source for your accusation against Boeing and the B-747-8 shop floor? Do you have a source for the FAA being so incompetent as to not notice, or not being able to enforce their own regulations? Or are you just continuing to spru your anti-US and anti-Boeing commentary again?

    Check your spelling and then the internet.:
    Afair Flightblogger and Dominic Gates had articles on this topic when the delays
    became public and causal issues were diseminated.
    The available documentation used for creating a valid CATIA model did not represent
    the product as manufactured.

    I still await your disproving anything I wrote 😉

    • Flightblogger has a slant towards Airbus. They are not always fair to Boeing (yes, sometimes they are), but they almost always put a positive spin on any story they write about Airbus.

      • I’d guess that you meant to say Flightglobal/Flight-International and not Flightblogger. Seemingly, Jon Ostrower primarily reported on Boeing/787 developments and not on what transpired in Europe. With all the access given to him by Boeing, clearly he can’t have been all that bad, from the point of view of Boeing, could he?

        IMO, AW&ST is less “neutral” than Flight International. For too long, the magazine has IMO been uncritically regurgitating inside the Beltway talking points such as “full spectrum dominance” and with Airbus seen as the “bad guy” in the WTO brawl.

  7. OK, Everybody, listen up:

    In the last two days I’ve had to warn people about personal attacks as a violation of our Reader Comment policy. The comments above contain additional attacks. Knock it off or I will close Comments again for an indefinite time.

    Hamilton

  8. OV-099 :
    IMO, AW&ST is less “neutral” than Flight International. For too long, the magazine has IMO been uncritically regurgitating inside the Beltway talking points such as “full spectrum dominance” and with Airbus seen as the “bad guy” in the WTO brawl.

    OV, I have been reading Aviation Week each and every week for thirty-three consecutive years. Occasionally I have lamented that they were too american-centric. But today I would hold a different opinion. I think they have adapted to the slow displacement of the centre of gravity of commercial aviation from the USA towards Europe.

    They are rigorous and fair in their treatment of the business. They are always respectful of the various aircraft manufacturers, but never complacent. Neither towards Boeing nor Airbus. Or Bombardier and Embraer for that matter.

    If I was alarmed very early in the development of the 787 Dreamliner it is because I was reading the regular progress reports in Aviation Week. If you read those reports carefully, and sometimes you had to read between the lines, you could have had a fairly good idea of what was going on. When I say you had to read carefully, I mean they are too civilized to be blunt. It is what we call diplomacy. They know that it would be counter productive to burn any bridges.

    What I like about AW&ST is that they let you forge your own opinion with the facts they provide and report on. And they keep the expression of their or others opinion for the very last page.

    • Normand, I stopped subscribing to AW&ST soon after Craig Covault, for all practical purposes, was given the boot in 2008 and the “ST” reporting and analyses IMO went down the drain. I still glance through the magazine though, at my workplace library.

      I would agree that the 787 reporting has been no worse at AW&ST than at other industry trade magazines. However, in this case the 787 was not on my radar screen. To put it shortly, AW&ST has sadly IMO too often been parroting what the military, industrial, congressional complex wants. And no, I’m not talking about Bill Sweetman vs. Lockheed Martin and the F-35. 😉

      As you indicate, AW&ST has been quite American-centric. I do believe though that they still are very much American-centric. Far more so IMO than Flight International is “euro-centric”. For example, just look at the recipients of AW&ST’s yearly “Aerospace Laurels”. True, a few foreigners are given the honours, but the vast majority of the recipients are Americans.

      • Well, I am afraid I will have to agree with you here. I deplore the departure of Craig Covault as much as I do.

        You are right when you say that they have too often been parroting the military-industrial complex. But we have to understand that it is a trade magazine first and foremost. But it happens to be read also by many aviation buffs.

        I still think they are much less American-centric than they used to be. They maintain a few correspondents overseas that produce excellent articles. They have even retained the services of Pierre Sparaco who has been retired for sometime.

        But, as you have mentioned, if there is one area where they remain ultra American-centric it is in the attribution of the Aerospace Laurels. 🙁

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