Amid all the fine financial news Boeing can tout—a record order backlog, robust profit margins, a higher profit outlook—one of the airplane maker’s dreariest performers continues to be its highest-tech, most fuel-efficient product: the 787 Dreamliner.
Boeing continues to lose money on each Dreamliner it builds. The company expects to reach the break-even point on some models turned out by its 787 program in 2015. In the most recent quarter, production costs rose again for the 787, which has become one of Boeing’s most popular models due to its lightweight carbon composite airframe and the resulting lower fuel burn. The program’s deferred production cost, an accounting measure of how efficient an assembly program becomes over time, rose 4 percent, to $25.2 billion, in the third quarter, topping the $25 billion cap Boeing had forecast for the 787 program.
