Posted on 11/16/2005 3:11:23 AM PST by mym
MOSCOW, November 15 (RIA Novosti) - Two hundred Russian engineers in Moscow are designing a cargo aircraft, the Boeing-747LCF, that will be used to deliver components for the new Boeing-787 Dreamliner passenger plane.
"Moscow is handling the design of this special cargo plane, which will deliver components produced in Japan, Britain, France, and Russia to the aircraft-manufacturing plant in Seattle for final assembly of the Dreamliner, which will only take three days," Sergei Kravchenko, the president of U.S. aircraft giant Boeing in Russia and the CIS, said.
Kravchenko said the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI) had built an experimental test bench for static and dynamic tests of life-size fuselage panels of the Boeing-787.
Under the Dreamliner project, Boeing also cooperates with the Russian Academy of Sciences and the All-Russian Aviation Materials Institute (VIAM).
Kravchenko said the new project had caused Boeing to increase its purchases of industrial titanium alloys in Russia.
The tests of the Boeing-787 will be finished in 2006. The plane will conduct its first flight in 2007 and will be supplied to the first buyer in Japan in 2008.
The volume of the market for the Dreamliner, which will replace the 767 model, is estimated at
3,500 planes over the next 20 years.
The Russia-Boeing Dreamliner project is being conducted within the framework of an agreement signed in November 2004 between the Russian Industry and Energy Ministry and Boeing.
Ping
I'm guessing that reliability and maintainability are the issue.
Beat me by 20 seconds!
The Soviets/Russians were never good at making efficient or fast planes, but making freakin' huge planes is and has been their forte. Unless my memory is flawed, it was an Antonov that carried the EP-3 back from China in '01. Given enough time and money, the Rooskies could probably build a plane to pack up and move China itself.
Many years ago, a unified people had become so arrogant that they decided to build, and climb, a 'stairway' to heaven ... God saw all of this and said, "I don't think so."
God broke down their LEGO's and confounded their language so it could never happen again.
There seems to be a re-ignition of the old "I want to be God" desire.
The problem is, the babeling has been going on for some time now and the confounded languages have learned, and use the binary language.
Everything is the same thing only different.
Sit back and watch the show .... but be sure of your salvation ... and tell others how they too can be saved.
They have very inefficient engines. They are desigmed as military transports with roll on roll of loading. The are great for transporting unique high value items that need to be transported long distances quickly, but it's not the plane you'd want routinely transporting components for a mass production line.
The 747-400 is a very efficient modern commercial cargo plane that has lots of spare parts available world wide. Just about half of the 1360 or so 747's ever built are 400 series. There is a large pool of pilots that can fly them. Basing the LCF on the 747 will save Boeing billions of dollars over the life of the 787 program. Sure lots of specialized ground equipment will be needed to load and unload cargo, but this plane will be used only between a few airports that will be equipped to handle them.
==They have very inefficient engines. They are desigmed as military transports with roll on roll of loading. The are great for transporting unique high value items that need to be transported long distances quickly, but it's not the plane you'd want routinely transporting components for a mass production line.==
Thanks for the explanation!
Thanks a ton for your analysis - would've taken me an hour to dig that stuff up.
(Don't we just LOVE Freerepublic.)
Wow!
Aviation ping.
What, no biplane model of the 747LCF?
Yeah, I didn' think about restrictions of routine transporting.
An-225 take-off: http://rapidshare.de/files/7709556/antonov.wmv.html
Scroll down, click on the 'FREE' button, then wait until the seconds at the bottom of the page count down to zero, and the link appears.
Great picture. Thanks.
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