There are a lot of stories of the early days of the 787. We were pushing the envelope for many things: composite manufacturing techniques, an all-electric architecture, and a new manufacturing system. I was involved in the last part of that; building out a new shop-floor automation system.

One of the things we were constantly dealing with was the sheer scale of the problem. The shop floor system, Velocity, was painfully slow (not helped by a few O(n^2) loops in the tool). But even more troubling was the manufacturing automation system, DELMIA.

The problem with DELMIA was that the 32-bit version couldn’t handle the full 787 model. Only the 64-bit version could load the models. This was 2007, when 64-bit machines and operating systems were still fairly rare. In addition, the bridge between DELMIA and Velocity didn’t support the 64-bit version of DELMIA.

Still, the airplane needed to get built, and there needed to be instructions on how to build it. Luckily, Velocity had support for attaching additional documents to a shop order instruction (SOI). The work-around that was developed was that the instructions were authored in 64-bit DELMIA. Then, the manufacturing engineers would take screen shots of the instructions in DELMIA, paste them into PowerPoint slide decks, save it as a PDF, and then attach the PDF to the SOI.

The first 787, ZA001, was assembled using PowerPoint.

Boeing never sold ZA001, for many reasons. Among them, I lost count how many times the wings were taken off¹ (At some point, I want to talk about the Lego 787 model. It has one specific area where the model bears an uncanny verisimilitude to the prototype.) However, this was close to the root cause: They never had configuration control over the air craft.

(Note: ZA001 on roll-out day, famously, had a lot of wood parts on it to meet the deadline. Wood is a composite material.)