A large number of Boeing Co.’s 787 Dreamliners are still out of stock while the company goes through a month-long inspection process to detect manufacturing flaws, but orders and deliveries for other jet programs have continued.
The aerospace giant, which will build the 787 jet in South Carolina next month, delivered 26 aircraft last month, double what it gave customers the same month last year, when the troubled 737 Max was still banned from fly.
After a 20-month shutdown, Boeing was able to deliver 737s again starting in December, when 27 of them were delivered to customers. Another 21 were delivered in January, along with a P8 military aircraft and four non-Dreamliner widebody aircraft.
The 787 had its third consecutive month of zero delivery.
CEO Dave Calhoun told investors during a call on January 27 to expect so much, due to ongoing inspections of the 787s taking place on the North Charleston Dreamliner campus, as well as the widebody factory in Everett, Wash. And a Boeing facility in Victorville, California.
In February there will be “few if any” deliveries of Dreamliner, he said.
Boeing still hopes to start delivering 787s to customers this quarter, but as of Tuesday, none of the jets have been delivered since October.
Overall, on the delivery side, however, Boeing outperformed competitor Airbus, which shipped a total of 21 jets to customers in January.
Boeing has also registered four new orders for 747-8 freighters.
The conversions and cancellations also led Boeing to a negative net result for the month, with two orders for 737 canceled and four widebodies.
Another 11 Max jets were removed from the portfolio because of accounting rules for a January net total of 13 negative aircraft.
No Dreamliner has been ordered since last March, when Japanese carrier All Nippon Airways agreed to buy a dozen 787s.
During the past spring and summer, Boeing pointed out the grounding of the COVID-19 and 737 Max as to blame for the low delivery totals. But after errors were found in the production of the 787, an extensive inspection process began to aggravate the delays that were already occurring because of COVID.
In late January, Boeing chief financial officer Greg Smith said he had about 80 Dreamliners in stock. With inspections underway and deliveries still on hold, this total will increase as more jets are built, although this is taking place at a slow pace.
When the consolidation of the 787 program becomes official next month, stopping all production of the jet in Washington State, North Charleston will be manufacturing five Dreamliners per month.
Smith said in January that he hopes to roll out the 2020 jets that are in stock by the end of this year, in addition to the approximately 60 aircraft that will be assembled in South Carolina in 2021.
A Twitter account dedicated to detecting planes on the Boeing campus in South Carolina shared a video on February 3 of a Singapore Airlines 787 sitting “stored and not delivered”. More than others, this plane can give you an idea of how long it is waiting to be delivered because of a sticker that marks it as the “thousandth Dreamliner” of the program.
The social media accounts that watched planes first shared images of that important jet last spring. According to posts, he was spotted taking test flights in April 2020, just days before the plant was temporarily closed for a few weeks as a precaution against the spread of COVID-19.