NARRATOR: The modern jetliner
is one of the most complex machines ever built.
Determining how and when to launch a new airplane,
and which new technologies to include,
is one of the great challenges of the aerospace business.
- When you're building a new aircraft,
it's a really huge undertaking.
And it's so much is riding on it.
The company's whole future is at stake.
NARRATOR: In 2000, Boeing had a decision to make.
- We set aside a small team,
and literally locked 'em up in a room.
And said, "We need you to start thinking about
a brand new airplane."
- We got to understand that.
NARRATOR: Boeing called it the Sonic Cruiser.
So, there was this really enthusiastic group
of engineers at Boeing that were working on the Sonic Cruiser,
you know, like their life depended on it.
It was the coolest thing at Boeing.
NARRATOR: It would be a dramatic departure from the design
of existing commercial jets.
It would have a delta wing, rear-mounted engines,
two small canards near the front,
and a fuselage made of a synthetic material, not metal.
Built for speed, it would fly just below the speed of sound.
- The shape of the Sonic Cruiser
was like virtually nothing that had been seen before.
It was a thing of beauty.
- It just caught everybody's imagination.
And what the airlines were looking at were two things.
One is that 20% faster--
gave the passenger what they wanted, right?
You'd get someplace quicker.
The other thing was the airplane flies 20% faster,
in theory, you should need 20% less of 'em.
- The problem is that once you nudge the speed
up to that level, it becomes a gas guzzler.
There's nothing you can do about it.
NARRATOR: And one consistent concern of every airline
is the cost of fuel.
- It's not just the fact
that fuel cost's higher,
but it's the fact that it's so variable
that it constitutes a huge risk to the airlines.
You just can't foresee exactly what's going to happen.
- This just in, we're looking at the World Trade Center...
- The day after the 9/11 tragedy,
there was a meeting in Seattle for aerospace professionals.
Everybody was shell-shocked by the events of the previous day,
but there was almost a recognition
that the supersonic era was suddenly over with
and we were looking at a much more austere future.
- After 9/11 everything changed.
Price of oil went through the roof.
Our customers told us they wanted an airplane
that went long range,
burned much less fuel.
And for all of that they'd be willing to sacrifice
all the performance we had-- the speed
and some of the other things.
- Although it was a sad kind of acknowledgment, really,
of the realities of life, Boeing got on with it, you know?
Hey, the market's spoken, we know what they want,
let's go and do it.
NARRATOR: Boeing would call its new plane the 787 Dreamliner.
It would travel at conventional speeds,
but it would incorporate many of the advanced technologies
intended for the Sonic Cruiser.
What would set this new plane apart from every commercial jet
that had preceded it would be the very material
used to construct it.
Boeing's 787 Dreamliner
would not be made out of metal,
but out of fiber-reinforced plastic.
It is an advanced variation of composite,
the kind of material commonly used in small consumer products
such as tennis rackets and bike helmets.
It's made of lightweight carbon fibers
fabricated into thin layers and infused with a glue.
The combination is much stronger
than either ingredient on its own--
ten times stronger than its weight in steel.
Companies around the world were chosen to engineer
and manufacture large sections.
The most ambitious innovation
Boeing and its partners introduced
was the process of spooling long strips of carbon fiber
onto what are essentially enormous robotic tape dispensers
that lay the material down in precise, complex patterns.
It takes the shape of specific parts,
like a wing or a fuselage.
And then the huge sections are transferred
into a massive sealed chamber called an autoclave,
where they are hardened under heat and pressure.
- If you think about a fuselage barrel in a plane like a 787
there's as many as nine people
sitting across in a row.
So, it's a pretty wide object.
Imagine that I have to cure it under heat and pressure.
It's like... how would I describe it?
Imagine putting an airplane in an oven.
NARRATOR: Out of these giant autoclaves
come pre-built sections of the plane
that once would have required hundreds of aluminum sheets,
tens of thousands of rivets and countless man-hours to assemble.
- If you look at the way we built the 707
back in the '50s,
and you look at the way we build a 787,
it is amazingly different, it is off-the-charts different.
NARRATOR: By the end of 2009, a finished Dreamliner was ready
for its first flight.
- From the time it started as something
on a piece of paper to an actual airplane,
it's five, six years sometimes of people's lives
that they've put into that one single thing.
(applause)
The culmination of all that pride
and ownership that you have,
to see the airplane come off the ground,
it's one of the most exciting things
that you'll ever experience.