The idea of bundling vastly dif erent technologies and con-
cepts for fl ight testing in one focused ef ort is radically dif-
ferent from former evaluations, when often the fi rst time so
many new features fl ew together was on a prototype aircraft.
“When I think back 10 or 20 years, you either had to lease
an aircraft from a customer or take time on a production
fl ight test to make changes, and then change the aircraft back
again. Even then you were only going to test one thing. But
if you make a plan that says every year or two you are going
to test 50 things, then you get that combined ef ect. That’s
the ground-breaker here. In our environment it was hard to
commit an airplane when you didn’t know what you’d put on
it. But if you commit to creating value you can put an airplane
in the plan and then you fi nd things to populate it,” he adds.
So how does Boeing decide what fl ies on the ecoDemon-
strator, and where does that selection sit against the back-
ground of the company’s overarching product development
goals? The approach is threefold, says Sinnett. It satisfi es the
short-term goal of enabling current products to be upgraded,
it feeds new technology in the mid-term for the next genera-
tion now in development—such as the 737 MAX, 777X and
787-10 —and longer term, it steers toward the performance
goals of future concepts like the 737 replacement and middle-
of-the-market (MOM) studies.
Technology needs populate a road map of development
priorities that come down from the chief project engineers
across the current programs as well as from Scott Fancher,
senior vice president and general manager of the Airplane
Development organization leading the next-generation
products. They also fi lter down from the senior project en-
gineers in product development for the generation beyond,
who cover the functional areas such as structures, systems
and propulsion.
“Chief project engineers are thinking about today’s air-
planes, the senior chief engineers are thinking over the ho-
rizon and Scott’s people are thinking about everything in
between,” says Sinnett. “So as we work to create a relevant
portfolio, we’re getting better at collaborating with those
three horizons of people. You get a relevant list and every-
one looks at it and says ‘yes we need to do that,’ and then it is
easier to start thinking of things that need to be fl ight-tested
as a prototype. If it is on the list and none of them want it,
then it probably should not be on the list,” he adds.
Technology candidates range from specifi c low-budget en-
gineering projects proposed by employees under Boeing’s
internal “Grand Challenges” program to larger-scale projects
developed for test under joint initiatives with industry, the
FAA and NASA.
With two programs completed and a third getting under-
way, Boeing is already seeing the direct benefi ts of the eco-
Demonstrator, says Director of Environmental Performance,
Jeanne Yu. “It has been heartening and exciting for me to
see that the ecoDemonstrator is actually achieving what we
set out to do. It is inspiring innovation and accelerating en-
vironmentally progressive products and services, as well as
providing better performance. It’s also better for the environ-
ment. That’s the beauty of it and that’s why the uptake has
happened for us,” she adds.
A key ingredient of this success is being able to test and
raise the technology readiness level of particular features and
systems of the critical path of specifi c aircraft development
programs. “We have laid out a plan looking ahead that puts
the demonstrators in certain time frames that don’t require
individual technologies to buy themselves into a fl ight-test
program. We can set up a time frame and actually accelerate
the maturity of these technologies,” says Yu. This fl exibility
also makes it easier to match the availability of production-
ready technologies to specifi c product generations. “Product
strategy stretches and squeezes, so we look at what are the
on-ramps for the airplane. The ecoDemonstrator is on all
these technology road maps, so if we balance that with our
product strategy we can accelerate where we need to do that.
It is dovetailing both the technology road maps and product
strategy together.”
Tests on the 787 ecoDemonstrator included a wide array
of fl ight deck technologies designed to enhance ef ciency and
situational awareness. These included in-fl ight wind updates
and direct route features, the fi rst of which demonstrated 1.5
min. worth of fuel savings during a test fl ight along the West
Coast. Winds and traf c data for fuel-ef cient routing were
transmitted in real time to the aircraft via standard radios.
To explore future operational ef ciency capability a large-
bandwidth Panasonic exConnect Ku-band satellite antenna
and an onboard network system (ONS) were used to down-
load turbulence predictions, weather and fuel information
directly to the fl ight deck for weather updates, as well as a
Boeing tablet application called “Door-to-Door.” The applica-
tion, designed to help a pilot track duty and non-duty tasks,
was one of several tested on the 787.
Yu says the ecoDemonstrator provides Boeing and its part-
ners a rare opportunity to evaluate a system in an operation-
ally relevant environment. Tests of a fl ight trajectory opti-
mization and information-management system, for example,
built on initial trials in 2011 and “are about the management
of information and how we can update the route in fl ight,”
she says. “We are trying to fi gure out how to distill the data
[about winds, route updates and turbulence] and present it in
a useful format. A lot of this is a work in progress and informsAviationWeek.com/awst AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MARCH 30-APRIL 12, 2015 45
Real-time weather data was uplinked to the pilot’s iPad
through an onboard network server, one of three suc-
cessfully demonstrated applications.BOEING