Dreamliner Delays Disjoint Boeing

Stallard continues to anticipate 20 deliveries in 2010, 40 in 2011 and 60 in 2012, but notes "investors should build in conservative expectations about the 787's progress."

At midday Wednesday, shares in Boeing, a Dow Jones Industrial Average component, were trading down 2% to $42.98, after losing 6.5% on Tuesday. The shares began trading this year at $42.80 and have essentially returned to their Jan. 2 level, just as the S&P 500 has. After hitting a 52-week-low around $29 on March 3, Boeing shares traded as high as the $53 range early this month.

The latest problem was discovered late last month, while engineers were "bending the wings of the full-scale test airplane," said Pat Shanahan, general manager of airplane programs, on a conference call Tuesday with reporters and analysts. But it was not until Friday that the company decided it would be largely pointless to go ahead with the first flight without first fixing the problem. Boeing said it will announce a new first flight and first delivery schedule in several weeks and will update financial guidance in July.

The problem exists in about 18 places on each side of the aircraft, and involves "a couple of square inches of stress concentration (located) along the joint between the wing and the side of body," said Scott Fancher, general manager of the 787 program. "We saw strain gauges on the aircraft not meet our predictions (and) we saw a number of things indicative of what the strain gauges were saying."