will this fit in my macbook air?

jak0b

@Soundman1402: One of three, actually.

lpranal

@jmurph05 will it blend?

kwjayhawk

Is that the same cord required to power the nVidia GX280?

Soundman1402

I distinctly remember the American ambassador to Ethiopia making a speech at a dinner, at the conclusion he said "remember, Ethiopia airlines is going to be doing a non-stop flight from Dulles to Addis Ababa on the 787's starting MAY 2008!!"
Poor guy.

qbrad

@mpjohnst: Can it play Crysis?

jmurph05

I dare you to stick your tounge on that cord.

Lupison

Largest USB peripheral ever!

mpjohnst

Hey girl... your legs tired?

"Why?" you say? 'Cause you been runnin' through my Dreamliner all day long.

scarbrtj

hot.

IVPPITER

This was just powering on the electricity, right? How far are they from actually starting the engines?

Barcard

The major milestones definitely have gotten smaller for Boeing.

heroineworshipper

preeetttyyyy....?

blackwand

Dave looks far to happy for just plugging in an airplane

Geisrud

Pic-ture?

12-Inch Idongivafuck Sandwich

...what...picture?

shiftyeyedgoat

I wonder where the cup holders are?

citizensmith

I hate it when people don't pull the plastic shipping material off of a screen!

It doesn't need to be there!!! Just pull it off and show me the shiny-ness!

Also - I dont see any shots of the orgy room up and running. That is, after-all, why we all hit the jump, isn't it?!

tek_nic

That is not the external power line he is plugging in, the is a sneak peek at the new USB 3.0 connector.

PocketLint

is it just me or does that first picture look like a bad photoshop job.

qwijybo

I know this is going to sound a bit pedantic but Aircraft is the plural of Aircraft, not Aircrafts...you may want to change your tags...

DwayneHapiloons

So... What's gonna happen when the plane takes off and the power cord isn't long enough?

adamator

That grey-ish box with the fixtures above the access panel sure does NOT look aerodynamic. Prototype only? Yucky design for a beautifly sleek plane.

rtwod2

I notice an iPod dock in the cockpit, so Boeing is keeping up with current driver trends.

Do you suppose that external power connector is an industry standard plug? Is that what is on all Boeing aircraft, and is it also used by Airbus? If it is an industry standard, what are specs on that bad boy? Any Boeing employees here today to shed some light on this?

Monty

it should have been 'plug n play' rite? and does it do mp3s? got some big ass screens there... should work well with the cowon.... when do the fight attendants come in?

snowy_coke

@adamator: They get a longer cord. Honestly.

Slap Bet

I think that giant cord looks a little like an ethernet cable...sorta. Maybe.

Karinabob

I thought there was supposed to be a HUD...

adamdouglasking

They'll never get more than 100 miles on one charge until GM gets its head of its...oh, sorry, thought I was on Jalopnik again.

theOriginalDrew(draws2)

Powering up this airplane is a huge deal. First of all, it's powered by 270VDC. Most aircraft in the world are powered by 28VDC. And why all of this huge voltage? Well, the engines are started electrically and that requires a huge amount of torque--roughly 600ft*lbs of torque at 0RPM--and hence huge amounts of current (which, even at 270VDC, is a lot... and trust me, I know--I work for the company that makes the starters, Hamilton Sundstrand). Go look up the specs for a Corvette and be impressed.

On top of that, there are other systems on the aircraft which used to be operated by air being pumped off the engine (called "bleed air") which are now being powered electrically. Cabin air compressors, nitrogen generation systems, hydraulic pumps, and many, many other things are electrically operated now. And since bleed air doesn't exist on either of the engine options (Rolls Royce or GE), turning on the airplane is a really big deal. There's a lot of energy conversion going on in that plane.

And oh, by the way, those starters which start the engine? Their controllers (each of which is a box of electronics weighing the same as an average person but which is only the size of a very large A/V receiver) turn the starters around and make them run as generators. All told, the airplane has in excess of 1.25MW--that's MEGAwatts, folks--of power generation on board. The average 747? Probably only about 250kW or so.

So, when you say "the major milestones have gotten smaller," you might be mixing this airplane up with other airplanes. (Powering up any airplane for the first time is still a big deal, by the way, just not as big a deal as with this one. Imagine, for example, what might happen if somebody had designed a nice short across the ground cart input. It wouldn't be pretty and might ensure that you don't have a Serial Number 1 airplane anymore.)

@Barcard - Both engines have been run on test stands at RR and GE well over two years ago at this point, and both engines have been flown on 747 test aircraft, too. Engine development is cruising right along. I'm not sure when they'll start 'em on the airframe, though.

@Geisrud - Interestingly, people take a great deal of pride in being able to say "I plugged the 787 in for the first time" or "I pressed the button that executed the first electric start of a commercial, high-bypass turbofan engine." (My colleague got to say that on Valentine's Day, 2006, at Rolls Royce.) These little things become lore to some, depending on what it is that was done. People in my organization know, for example, that my colleague pressed that button. It's geeky just like "I found a bug in Linux kernel 2.6" or something.

@Monty - I doubt it's standard--as in "commonly found at airports"--as this kind of power (±270VDC, huge currents) hasn't ever been deployed at airports before, though it's likely to be a standard--as in, you could buy one if you wanted to pay the price, probably $300-$500, I'd guess--connector from somebody's catalog at this point.

(A $300-$500 connector with a few pins in it may seem like a lot, but it's not unusual to pay thousands for some specialized aerospace connectors with fire ratings, pressure ratings, temperature ratings, corrosion ratings, vibration ratings, and, oh by the way, some electrical properties, too.)

Plug 'n' play? In this case, I'm betting there was a lot of plug 'n' pray going on!

Technical tidbit: A lot of the airplane communications is done with something called AFDX (avionics full-duplex switched Ethernet) which, at the physical layer and network layer (I think--look it up on Wikipedia) is very similar to what runs around the house. It also uses CANbus pretty heavily and will eventually run TTP (time-triggered protocol). AFDX and TTP are very aerospace. CANbus is very automotive. Guess which is more expensive? Yup! AFDX and TTP cost about $10,000 per node and CANbus is only about $50 per node (or less). But they do different things, so, I guess you get what you pay for.

@Slap Bat - Wrong. They just wind up the rubber band just that much tighter.

BillEccles

Is this one of those new plug-in hybrids they've been talking about? How many miles can it go between charges? :p

LittleJon

errr... ladies and gentlemen.....err....
we are a feet above sea level......
uh uh... zipping through at a feet per year...err....
we'll be arriving in no time.... um...
weather all sunny with dry casts and forest fire everywhere
thank you for flying with us..... (PA system still active)

Damn where the h#ll is the stick... aha... yup yup... losing power... guys!! suck the s##t out of this plane!!!!! whoppie... we've got a BSOD here,... da-yum... pretty slick... like that tight flygirl.......

snowy_coke

@adamdouglasking: there is a HUD. The screens that they project onto are folded up in the picture. You can see them covered by blue things just above the windscreen

mitgangm

@Barcard: Probably started it's engines the first time a couple years ago, testing...
Ok, so now that I got my technical asshole comment out of the way, seriously, probably IN the plane in a couple/few months. Then taxi tests, etc, etc...then weeks after that, it flies. We hope.

shenanigans61

I went on a Boeing tour of their plant in Everett last week, and got to see the Dreamliners being built. Pretty sweet stuff.

dangster

@BillEccles:
Thanks for the technical spill, very informative!.

Isn't it amazing how people can belittle the work of others when they have no frikking clue?

I can imagine the pride that thousands of people that worked on this project have at this moment... and what a sight of relief is for Boeing to get things underway.

:)

aec007

@BillEccles: Your comment was about 10,000 times better than the article. Thanks!

matto

@BillEccles: Man that was great.

scarbrtj

so Bill, there is no 400 cycle AC equipment in the Dreamliner? Most aircraft in the past used 28v or 3-phase 120VAC at 400 cycles (insted of the usual 60) as it is far more efficient, motors with the same torque as a 60hz motor can be made much smaller. If our national electrical grid was designed after WWII there is no way it would have been 60Hz.

fun tidbit: back in the old days when aircraft like 747 and 727 needed a flight engineer.. The generators were 3-phase, and they had to be manually phase-matched before it was actually tied onto the electrical system. If you accidentally flipped the switch to tie-in the generator when it wasn't phased, the shaft would stall for that 1/3 of a rotation and snap in half. One wrong flip of a toggle switch and the plane had to be sent to the shop. Kudos to our automatic-everything-ass world.

barco

There are dual HUDs standard on the 787, and yes, the HUD Combiners are the folded-up blue things in the photo. The HUDs are part of the Displays & Crew Alerting (DCA) package from Rockwell Collins. Previously, the Boeing Business Jet (BBJ) version of the 737 was the only Boeing plane that came with HUDs standard, but that was on the left side only.

oreamnos

@barco: I shoulda' mentioned that the starter/generators produce variable voltage, variable frequency AC when they're in generate mode, and they do use 400Hz AC (whose source I can't remember at the moment) in that process. That same 400Hz is used for the galleys and other stuff too, I think. On top of that, there are some monstrous boxes on the plane made by Thales (pronounced taal'-ess) in France called Autotransformer Rectifier Units, ATRUs, which convert AC on the plane (or ground power, perhaps) to DC for the motor controllers to use in the starting process.

@matto, scarbrtj, aec007: Thanks! It's not often I get to throw a technical nugget into the Intertubes and even less often that it's appreciated!

BillEccles