EVERETT – Call it a reverse Cinderella story. The Boeing Co.’s fairy tale jet, its 787 Dreamliner, tiptoed out of the Everett factory, unpolished and unpainted, three minutes after midnight Tuesday.
Working under the cover of darkness, Boeing shuffled the nearly naked new Dreamliner from its assembly bay to the company’s paint hangar. There, the first 787 will don a fresh coat of paint before making its official – and very public – debut July 8.
Boeing will unveil its painted 787 Dreamliner to a crowd of 15,000 at the company’s Everett factory. Some 50,000 current and former Boeing employees may watch the event televised at Qwest Field in Seattle. Boeing anticipates as many as 100 million people worldwide may watch the 787’s rollout either over the Internet or on satellite television.
For the Tuesday morning rollout, only a portion of the Dreamliner’s tail was painted. The entire process of tugging the Dreamliner from the factory to the hangar took about 30 minutes.
Boeing spokesman Adam Morgan confirmed the first Dreamliner entered the paint hangar just after 12:30 a.m. Tuesday. However, Morgan couldn’t say how long it will take to finish painting.
The unpainted Dreamliner didn’t have the familiar green coating that Snohomish County residents are used to seeing on unpainted planes parked around Paine Field. Boeing’s new jet is made mostly of carbon fiber composite material, not of aluminum like most commercial jets.
Plane manufacturers like Boeing cover the aluminum structures with a green coating to protect it until the jet is painted.
The plane’s Tuesday rollout demonstrates that structural assembly of the first 787 is complete. Not all of the jet’s wiring will be installed prior to July 8, Boeing officials have said.
Most major 787 structures arrived in Everett in mid-May. Boeing’s specially modified 747 cargo jet carried pieces from suppliers in Italy, South Carolina, Kansas and Japan to Everett. The company officially began final assembly of the initial Dreamliner May 21.
Ultimately Boeing plans to snap together its 787 jets at a pace of one every three days. This first 787 took about a month to assemble.
In piecing together the first 787 jet, Boeing has acknowledged a few glitches, including a minor gap between the forward fuselage and nose sections. Industry analysts say such difficulties are to be expected when building the first few jets of any new plane program.
The first 787 is expected to make its maiden flight later this summer. And Boeing intends to deliver a Dreamliner next May to Japan’s All Nippon Airways, its first customer.
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