Boeing says it won’t rush process of resuming 787 deliveries

Boeing Co. said it’s not racing to resume deliveries of its 787 Dreamliner as the company played down the risk that customers waiting for the jet might switch to rival planemaker Airbus SE.

Stan Deal, president and chief executive officer of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said the company is in talks with all the affected airlines and indicated he doesn’t expect to lose their orders.

“We hope the power of the product is going to get us through,” he said at a media briefing in Singapore ahead of the city’s biennial air show, which starts Tuesday. “But we don’t take that for granted.” Deal declined to specify when deliveries might restart, adding “we’re not going to rush the process.”

Boeing in January recorded $5.5 billion in total costs for the 787 Dreamliner, wiping away any near-term profit for the marquee wide-body jet. The 787 program’s profits have been erased as Boeing pays airlines for service they’ve lost because of delivery disruptions. 

The Chicago-based company hasn’t handed over any of the aircraft since June as it addresses a series of tiny imperfections on the carbon-fiber jet frames. Costs soared after Boeing determined that it needed to perform a labor-intensive fix involving the doors of the more than 110 aircraft in its system.

Boeing has meanwhile burned through more than $31 billion during a nearly three-year-long slump marked by the grounding of its 737 Max, the Covid-19 pandemic and a spate of quality lapses. 

Deal also said he expects deliveries of the Max to resume to mainland China “very shortly” after China’s civil aviation regulator moved closer to clearing the aircraft to fly late last year.

Deliveries are poised to restart from a completion center in Zhoushan, China, Deal said. He said Boeing has workers at the facility ready to finish assembling the jet for Chinese airlines.

“We plan to activate that immediately,” he said.