Boeing buyers’ ire builds as 787 disruptions pass 13-month mark

Frustration is mounting for customers waiting to take new Boeing 787 Dreamliners -- planes caught in a regulatory and production quagmire that has halted all but a few deliveries since October 2020. The popular wide-body jets will be needed to carry travelers across oceans as borders sealed shut by the Covid-19 pandemic start to reopen. But airlines and lessors trying to plan for the expected rush of travelers don’t know when their Dreamliners will arrive -- only that it won’t be this year, as Boeing executives once said. “The story line from Seattle has been manana, manana, manana,” Steven Udvar-Hazy, chairman and co-founder of Los Angeles-based Air Lease Corp., said of Boeing’s commercial division, which is based in Washington. “In July they said, ‘Oh, by August we’ll be fine.’ Then in August it was September. We have 11 aircraft that are ready and we can’t get them delivered.” More than 100 Dreamliners are stuck at Boeing, tying up inventory worth about $20b by Air Lease’s calculation and hampering the planemaker’s financial turnaround and efforts to pay down its $62b debt. Boeing is working to find and repair tiny structural imperfections about the width of a piece of paper in the carbon-fiber aircraft while addressing quality lapses among suppliers and their subcontractors. Both issues came to light as the Chicago-based planemaker did a deep dive in its factories and production system in the wake of two fatal crashes of its 737 Max.<br/>