Leeham News and Analysis
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777X change incorporation will take years to complete; Boeing mum on details
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By Scott Hamilton and Karl Sinclair
May 19, 2026, © Leeham News: Boeing hopes to finally gain certification of the 777X in the coming months. Deliveries should begin next year, the company has repeatedly said.
A Boeing 777-9 in final assembly at the Boeing plant in Everett (WA). Credit: Boeing.
On the 1Q2026 earnings call, CEO Kelly Ortberg said it will take years to complete the required change incorporation for an inventory of more than 30 777-9s. Some aircraft date to 2019 and have been stored since, while Boeing deals with a long, drawn-out certification process.
Ortberg said that “Change incorporation is basically for the airplanes that we have built. [We must] incorporate all the changes that have happened since they’ve been built. Things that result from the certification program, and things that happen as a result of productivity improvements or process improvements,” Ortberg said. “We go back in, and we incorporate all those changes before we make the delivery. It is a pretty massive activity that we have underway.”
Ortberg said that there is a dedicated team within BCA focused specifically on incorporating changes into the airplanes.
However, Boeing declines to detail the changes required, how long per airplane these might take, and whether customers intend to refuse delivery of these early airplanes.
LNA has learned that the first deliveries will likely be new production aircraft fresh off the final assembly line, rather than aircraft from inventory. The first production aircraft in testing is line #1781. According to the database Cirium, this is the 55th aircraft, for Lufthansa Airlines. Lufthansa was the first airline to order the 777X. Certification is expected late this year, with the first delivery next year. The first 777-9 was supposed to be delivered in 1Q2020, and perhaps in December 2019. The March 2019 grounding of the 737 MAX prompted the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to review the 777X certification program.
The 787: When the System That Makes Change Incorporation Possible was Dismantled
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By the Leeham News Team
The last in a Series examining one of Boeing’s steps toward recovery.
May 18, 2026, © Leeham News: The Boeing 787 program, launched in 2004 with a promised first flight in 2007 and customer delivery in 2008, was not simply a new airplane. It was a complete reimagining of how a commercial jet could be designed, funded, and manufactured.
Credit: Leeham News.
Boeing’s senior leadership, facing intense financial pressure and seeking to reduce its own capital exposure in a multi-billion-dollar development program, chose to distribute both the manufacturing and financial risks across a global supply chain of risk-sharing partners.
The level of industrial outsourcing on the 787 program led to one of corporate America’s greatest industrial financial and execution disasters. Credit: Seattle Times.
Suppliers would not merely provide components. They would design, build, and deliver complete major assemblies—entire fuselage sections, the wing structure, the empennage. The suppliers would absorb the tooling and development costs themselves in exchange for long-term production revenue.
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- Change incorporation: the high cost of getting it wrong
- Boeing’s Long Arc from Disciplined Rework to Distributed Chaos
- The 767: A Cockpit Crisis Creates the Template
- The 747-400: Derivative Programs Apply the Lessons
- The 777: Art form at its peak
The economic logic was genuinely compelling. Boeing watched Airbus fund the A380 with European government launch aid while Boeing shouldered its own development costs.
Executives thought that the risk-sharing model promised to drastically reduce Boeing’s capital outlay, spread the financial exposure across dozens of partners with their own balance sheets. Also, in theory, this model would harness the engineering capabilities of world-class suppliers who would bring design innovation along with manufacturing capacity. Suppliers like Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, Fuji, Alenia, and Spirit AeroSystems were not minor subcontractors. They were substantial aerospace manufacturers in their own right.
Reader Comments-Open Forum, Week of May 18
LNA’s Comments Open Forum allows Readers opportunities to comment about any post (note, we said “Post”, not any “Topic”). All comments will be held for review and Moderation per our new policy. The Open Forum enables Readers to Comment on paywall articles (to the extent the paywall preview is open to all readers).
Maintain civility and follow Reader Comment rules.
A new Open Forum will be posted weekly.
Bjorn’s Corner: Airliner Structures. Part 1
By Bjorn Fehrm
May 15, 2026, ©. Leeham News: We have finished a series on Blended WingBody (BWB) airliners, where one of the tougher challenges will be the design of the airframe structures.
In aircraft design, the aerodynamic shape of the aircraft gets a lot of attention for obvious reasons; it’s what we see, and if it’s well-made, it’s aesthetically beautiful.
For successful aircraft designs, a well-thought-out and designed structure is equally important. Aircraft designers and experts recognize a well-thought-out, well-designed structure when they see it, and it is an equally beautiful experience. In the series, we will see that the most iconic aircraft had a brilliant structural design.
Figure 1. The typical structural parts of an airliner fuselage (A320 fuselage structure). Source: Airbus.
We start the series on structures with what these must cover in terms of requirements. Then we go through how they have evolved over time, and finally we describe the changes that must occur over the next few years to meet the requirements of the next generation of airliners.
The 777: The Art Form at Its Peak
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By the Leeham News Team
Part 4 in a Series examining one of Boeing’s steps toward recovery.
May 14, 2026, © Leeham News: If there is a single moment in Boeing’s history when the pre-production change incorporation discipline reached its high point, it is the 777 program.
The Boeing 777-9 is the latest in the highly successful 777 family of airplanes. Credit: Leeham News.
Launched in October 1990, first flown on June 12, 1994, and certified on April 19, 1995, on schedule by Boeing standards, and with the unprecedented award of ETOPS-180 clearance simultaneous with entry into service, the 777 represented the integration of two decades of hard-won change incorporation experience with a transformative new tool: full digital design.
Credit: Leeham News.
This was legacy Boeing’s last hurrah, before the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, and the shift from an engineering company to one focused on pleasing Wall Street.
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- Change incorporation: the high cost of getting it wrong
- Boeing’s Long Arc from Disciplined Rework to Distributed Chaos
- The 767: A Cockpit Crisis Creates the Template
- The 747-400: Derivative Programs Apply the Lessons
The 777 program’s pre-production economics illustrated the principle at its most acute. United Airlines, the launch customer, placed an order for 34 firm aircraft and 34 options in October 1990. It was a transaction valued at approximately $11bn. United had a network plan that depended on those jets arriving on a specific schedule.
Boeing’s production system had to begin building customer aircraft well before the certification program could possibly conclude. This meant that by the time the type certificate was issued in April 1995, a substantial fleet of customer aircraft was already in various stages of completion.
Every one of these aircraft had been assembled to the engineering state at its specific build point in time. Each had a unique configuration history. And each required its own assessment before a change incorporation work package could be written for it.
The 747-400: Derivative Programs Apply the Lessons
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By the Leeham News Team
Part 3 in a Series examining one of Boeing’s steps toward recovery.
May 11, 2026, © Leeham News: The Boeing 747-400, which rolled out of Everett in January 1988 and earned its type certificate in January 1989.
This latest derivative of the Queen of the Skies was a substantial aircraft in its own right. New wings with six-foot winglets, a glass cockpit designed for two pilots in place of the classic three-crew analog flight deck, new engine options, tail fuel tanks, a new interior, and dramatically extended range made it, in certification terms, a new aircraft described as a derivative.
The first Boeing 747-400. Credit: Boeing.
The two-crew cockpit adoption on the 747-400 carried direct echoes of the 767 experience, but with the outcome predetermined. By 1988, the battle over crew complement for large jets had been decisively settled. The presidential task force findings, the success of the 767 and 757 in revenue service, and changing union contracts had all pushed the industry to the two-crew standard.
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- Change incorporation: the high cost of getting it wrong
- Boeing’s Long Arc from Disciplined Rework to Distributed Chaos
- The 767: A Cockpit Crisis Creates the Template
The 747-400 introduced a new glass cockpit designed for a flight crew of two instead of three, reducing the number of dials, gauges, and knobs from 971 to 365 through the use of electronics. This reduction speaks volumes about how dramatically the systems integration philosophy had matured.
Reader Comments-Open Forum, Week of May 11
LNA’s Comments Open Forum allows Readers opportunities to comment about any post (note, we said “Post”, not any “Topic”). All comments will be held for review and Moderation per our new policy. The Open Forum enables Readers to Comment on paywall articles (to the extent the paywall preview is open to all readers).
Maintain civility and follow Reader Comment rules.
A new Open Forum will be posted weekly.
Defense growth drives record first quarter for Embraer
By Thomas Blackwood
May 8, 2026, © Leeham News: Embraer has posted its best first quarter results in the Brazilian planemaker’s history, as increased demand for its defense products boosted its profitability.
Adjusted EBIT reached $94 million for the period, with a margin of 6.5% (versus 5.6% a year earlier), on revenues of $1.4 billion – the highest level the company has ever achieved and a 31% year-over-year (yoy) increase.
Embraer said this was as a result of strong showing across both its defense and commercial air transport divisions.
But it was the former that was a stand-out performer. Its Defense & Security unit generated revenues of $227 million, an increase of 63% over the previous year, driven by the KC-390 and A-29 Super Tucano. Notably, the adjusted EBIT margin rose from -1.6% to 17% yoy.
This week, Embraer signed a partnership agreement with Generation 5 Holding, a UAE-based defense and technology company, to develop MRO capabilities and after-sales support for the C-390 Millennium multi-mission military transport aircraft in the UAE and the wider Middle East.
Embraer also plans to ramp KC‑390 deliveries from about six aircraft in 2026 to 10 per year by the end of the decade, while capacity expansion is underway in Brazil and via potential localized final assembly lines in India and the US. Read more
Bjorn’s Corner: Blended Wing Body Airliners. Part 9
By Bjorn Fehrm
May 8, 2026, ©. Leeham News: We have made a series of articles on the Blended Wing Body (BWB) as a potentially more efficient design for passenger-carrying airliners than the classical Tube-And-Wing (TAW) configuration.
In last week’s article, we looked at the passenger experience on the JetZero Z4 and how the emergency escape facilities would be organized. There have been a lot of discussions on how a passenger will feel flying in a main cabin with only wide screens simulating side windows, with natural light coming through skylights in the roof. It’s difficult to say what the feeling will be. In a widebody aircraft, we sit at ease, far from the outside windows.
The emergency exit concept is straightforward, except for water landings, where buoyancy may be insufficient to keep the water line below the emergency exit doors. In that case, there have to be roof exits where the skyports are, made into emergency exits, along with some means to reach them.
Figure 1. The JetZero Z4 BWB. Source: JetZero.
Now it’s time to summarize what else we learned in the series.
The 767: A cockpit crisis creates the template
The Economic Imperative—and the Battle Over the Flight Deck
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By the Leeham News Team
Part 2 in a Series examining one of Boeing’s steps toward recovery.
May 7, 2026, © Leeham News: To understand why the Boeing 767 program produced such a massive change incorporation effort, you first have to understand the political and engineering battle that exploded over its cockpit that was still being fought while the first aircraft were already rolling down the assembly line in Everett.
Large civil transport jets historically required a three-person flight crew: a captain, a first officer, and a flight engineer. The flight engineer occupied a panel-covered station just aft of and between the two pilots, responsible for managing the aircraft’s complex systems—fuel, hydraulics, pressurization, electrical loads, engine parameters, and dozens of other functions that were too numerous and too demanding for two pilots absorbed in actually flying to manage simultaneously.
The Boeing 767-200 originally was designed for a three person flight deck crew. After several aircraft were produced, the FAA approved operations with two pilots. Ansett Airlines of Australia was the only carrier to take delivery of a three-person configured 767. Credit Reddit WeirdWings.
By the late 1970s when Boeing was designing the 767, advances in avionics automation had changed the equation. Computer-driven systems monitoring, electronic alerting, and centralized digital displays meant that a widebody aircraft could theoretically be designed for a two-person crew without degrading safety.
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- Change incorporation: the high cost of getting it wrong
- Boeing’s Long Arc from Disciplined Rework to Distributed Chaos
Boeing and most airline customers badly wanted the two-crew configuration. The financial savings from eliminating a flight engineer on every flight were substantial. Over thousands of annual flight hours per aircraft, the labor cost differential between a two-crew and three-crew operation compounded into millions of dollars per jet per year across a fleet.
Furthermore, a common two-crew type rating shared with the narrowbody 757, being designed concurrently, would give airlines enormous scheduling flexibility and reduce transition training costs. Every major airline customer had powerful economic incentives to push for two-crew operations.