Boeing shows its technology of the digitally designed 7E7

No cameras were allowed as Boeing drew back the veil yesterday from two Puget Sound sites where it's doing key work on its new 7E7 jet.

As Boeing embarks on a totally new way to build an airplane, Frank Statkus, head of technology processes on the 7E7 program, gave reporters a glimpse at the early phases of design and manufacturing.

In Everett, engineers showed how they collaborate in real time with colleagues worldwide on preliminary design concepts — all working from a single huge database held on servers in Bellevue that defines the entire airplane digitally.

The processes Boeing displayed will replace current systems for managing airplane development, systems painfully and expensively installed in the 1990s.

Then the tour moved south, from abstraction to reality, from digital drawings to massive steel tools.

Inside the secretive Developmental Center across from the Museum of Flight on Marginal Way, Boeing showed off prototype tools and robots that will be used to make huge single-piece sections of fuselage out of plasticized carbon fiber.

"Two years ago, these might have been categorized as invention," said Statkus, vice president of advanced technology, tools and processes for the 7E7. "Today, they happen to be reality."

In Everett, inside a bland windowless conference room, a team of 7E7 engineers sat facing two large wall screens.

One showed colleagues at Boeing's plant in Wichita, Kan. The other was a computer screen displaying a detailed, full-color engineering drawing of the 7E7 nose-and-cockpit section that will be produced in Wichita.

The line drawing is a preliminary design. Ever greater detail will be added as the plane develops.

"All the things you see here are in the process of evolution," Statkus said, "They are becoming more and more real."

The communications link to the room in Wichita was nothing extraordinary: Microsoft NetMeeting software that enables visual teleconferencing.

More important was the computer-screen representation of the 7E7, produced with Dassault Systemes software. All the partners worldwide will be able to work on the design together in real time.

Engineers in both sites could take control of the drawing and fly in virtual reality through the three-dimensional digital mock-up image — passing through the windscreen into the cockpit, moving like a ghost through the flight deck door to the passenger cabin and sinking through the floor into the cargo deck.

The software takes changes made by an engineer and can almost instantly work out the knock-on effect elsewhere, approving changes to anything else in the design that's affected.

The 777 was Boeing's first digitally designed airplane. The innovation with the 7E7 is that Boeing will use the same digital definition of the airplane not only in the design phase but right through manufacturing to maintenance.

The full Dassault/Boeing system for the 7E7 will replace a legacy system called DCAC/MRM (Define and Control Aircraft Configuration/ Manufacturing Resource Management).

The system, introduced in 1994 and completed last year, cost millions. Difficulties implementing it contributed to the production crisis in the late 1990s.

The digital files that hold the entire configuration of the airplane contain about two gigabytes of data.

Inside the Developmental Center in Seattle, floor-to-ceiling tarpaulins curtained off the 7E7 work from military work.

A gigantic cylindrical tool is one-sixth complete, Statkus said. When complete next month, it will be a tool capable of creating a one-piece fuselage section — 40 feet long and 22 feet in diameter.

A 20-foot-long slice of fuselage was produced in June. It was made by meticulously applying layers of carbon fiber tape infused with epoxy resin then baking it in a high-pressure oven.

The 7E7 will be the first commercial jet with a structure — wings and fuselage — made largely from advanced composite materials rather than aluminum. Project manager Laura Bogusch said the first full barrel section made from composites will be done by year's end.

The first slice of fuselage material was produced by old machines with a single computer-controlled tape-laying robotic arm. Bogusch showed a new set of machines taking shape with eight independently controlled robotic arms. Those arms are laying tape across what looks like a giant propane tank, a glass-fiber stand in for the fuselage as they test and calibrate the robot arms.

Until now, fuselages have been held together by millions of rivets. But huge sections of the 7E7 will not require fasteners — they'll be one piece.

Boeing invented the robots to keep up with planned production rates.

"Nobody in the world has that technology," Stakus said.

All the prototype tools in Seattle are to optimize manufacturing that will be done elsewhere.

The 7E7's wings will be made in Japan and the fuselage by Boeing partners in Japan, Italy and the southeastern U.S.

Close to one of the massive tools, a team of eight men — including employees of Boeing partners — tested various pieces of fuselage. One wore an Alenia Aeronautica lab coat. Another was a Japanese employee of Kawasaki Heavy Industries.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com