In an important milestone in the development of Boeing’s new 777X commercial jetliner, the Federal Aviation Administration has given the authority to begin a sequence of test flights necessary to gain approval for the 777X to enter passenger service.
For these tests, FAA pilots and engineers will be aboard the large new plane along with Boeing pilots and the flight test team.
They will observe firsthand how the aircraft performs in a series of rigorous maneuvers far beyond what a commercial aircraft normally encounters.
Boeing test pilots conducted the first flight certification test Friday evening with FAA personnel on board the aircraft. It took off from Boeing Field shortly after 6 p.m. and landed again almost two hours later after flying along the Washington and Oregon coasts.
The news is a big boost for Boeing. It must unlock new orders for the jets, whose sales have been stalled by years of delays in its development and lack of progress towards its certification to fly passengers.
The news comes just a week before the Farnborough Air Show near London opens, where Reuters reported that Boeing is expected to announce at least one new 777X order, for more than 20 planes from Korean Air.
Over the next year to 18 months, Boeing must put the plane through a series of required flight tests on four separate test planes to demonstrate to the FAA that the 777X can be certified as meeting all safety regulations.
Boeing has been flying the plane for more than four years, and the FAA has until now insisted that more analysis was needed. Now finally, it is ready to fly for credit.
The 777X is an upgraded and larger version of the all-metal 777 twinjet that debuted in the mid-1990s.
It features new engines and new carbon composite wings, so long that Boeing had to design 11-foot-long folding wingtips so the plane could fit through standard airport gates.
The first version, now being tested, is the 777-9X, which will carry 426 passengers in two-class seats on long-haul international flights.
A slightly smaller model, the 777-8X, will come later in both freighter and passenger variants.
Boeing has won 481 orders for the plane to date, with Gulf airline Emirates by far the biggest customer, with just over 200 on order.
Since Airbus has discontinued its A380 superjumbo jet due to lack of sales, the 777X is now the largest commercial jet available to airlines.
In addition to the four test planes, Boeing has already built and stored 22 of the 777X planes, many of them parked nose to tail on a runway at Paine Field with big blocks hanging from their wings instead of engines.
Another six are in various stages of assembly in Everett, according to a reliable online list of production planes.
All those aircraft built before certification is achieved will have to be reworked with any changes developed during the flight test program before they can be delivered to the airlines.
Long delays in development
In the past, new Boeing aircraft were generally certified and cleared to enter service within 18 months of first flight. The original 777 was certified almost exactly a year after it first flew in 1994.
The 777X was launched at the Dubai Air Show in 2013, first flew in January 2020 and now looks set to be certified in the second half of 2025, an unprecedented timeframe to develop a derivative of an existing aircraft.
To this point, Boeing said it has already put the 777-9X test fleet through “more than 1,200 flights and 3,500 flight hours in a wide range of regions and climate conditions.”
Now it has to repeat many of those tests for the FAA to observe, including in-flight stalls, intentional tail strikes and aborted takeoffs at full weight and speed.
“Certification flight testing will continue to validate the airplane’s safety, reliability and performance,” Boeing said via email. “We appreciate our regulator’s rigorous oversight.”
Indeed, the FAA has never been more rigorous.
The development of the 777X came under tighter regulatory scrutiny of Boeing products following two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX jets in 2018 and 2019, which together killed 346 people.
The FAA and European regulators required extensive testing and redesign of several 777X components, including a critical avionics system that regulates the movement of flight control surfaces on the plane’s wings and tail.
In a scathing letter three years ago, 17 months after the plane’s first flight, the FAA told Boeing it wasn’t nearly ready. Boeing’s safety assessments were missing data, software fixes were missing, and Boeing was introducing new design changes.
The FAA wrote at the time that its “concern is with the addition of late changes; Boeing must ensure that the changes do not introduce new, unintended failures.”
Boeing was ordered to “close these loopholes” before asking the FAA to allow certification flight testing to begin.
Three years later, the FAA is now satisfied and Boeing can finally move forward.
In what has been a dismal year for Boeing, it’s a much-needed lift.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
