There wasn’t much “sit back and relax” time for the men who piloted the first flight of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner on Tuesday.
Stormy weather cut the flight short, putting a damper on plans to take the 787 aloft for as long as five hours. The plane touched down at Boeing Field in Seattle at 1:33 p.m. Tuesday afternoon after about three hours in the air.
“We tested a little more aggressively than we were expecting,” Captain Randy Neville said after the plane landed on a rainy runway. “We had to contend with that weather out there today.”
Chief Pilot Mike Carriker had a sense of humor about the weather that cut his flight time by about two hours.
“We even got to do a functional check of the windshield wipers coming back in here,” he said.
They piloted the plane from Paine Field in Everett on Tuesday morning, flying north for a while before banking to the west to fly over the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
It was at that left turn that Carriker saw a site that took his breath away: the Olympic Range framed in the 787’s front window.
“That image will be in my mind for the rest of my life,” he said.
“That was about the last time we saw the Olympics,” Neville said.
Cloud banks settled in over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, hampering Boeing’s plans for a “visual flight” without sight obstructions.
The aircraft traveled up to about 15,000 feet at speeds up to about 180 knots (207 miles per hour). Neville said they planned some tests at higher speeds, but had to scale back their plans.
Boeing’s original plan had the plane flying east over the Cascade Range.
At first, the pilots had an aggressive flight-test plan of about five-and-a-half hours. They estimated that about half those tests were accomplished.
But while short, the three-hour flight was busy. The pilots eliminated risk factors early with tests that determined “everything was functioning.” They tested some of the airplane’s systems while on-board equipment recorded and transmitted data to a flight-test team at Boeing Field.
“There were no surprises,” Neville said. “The airplane did exactly as we were expecting.”
But not everything went off without a hitch. Monroe-resident Dennis Eckert was listening to a scanner monitoring the Boeing radio frequency during the flight and reported that the pilots had to put an anti-icing system into manual mode at one point.
He added that early in the flight, radio conversations revealed Neville had to reset the circuit breakers after a cone didn’t automatically deploy behind the aircraft. Cones are generally used for monitoring airspeed, and can be deployed manually.
Recent modifications to the 787 body added weight, but Carriker said the project’s chief engineer said the plane was in good shape. The extra weight didn’t show in Tuesday’s flight data, he said.
The 787 will fly again in about a week after more test equipment is installed, including sensors on some parts of the plane. The second of six test planes will also fly soon — most likely before Christmas, according to a Boeing spokesperson.
Regular passengers won’t get a chance to test the plane until late next year or early 2011.
Contact Herald writer Amy Rolph at 425-339-3029 or arolph@heraldnet.com.
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