By Howard Hardee • Editor
September 17, 2026
Boeing’s admission that the long-delayed certification of the 777X is expected to slip into next year may not surprise many industry observers. For months, it has appeared that the airframer’s next-generation 777 widebody jet was lagging the certification progress of the smaller 737 Max 7 and Max 10, with flight-testing incomplete and a critical authorization for long-hauling flying still out of reach.
CEO Kelly Ortberg still made waves with his comments during the Morgan Stanley Laguna conference on September 16 that certification flight testing of the 777-9 will likely wrap up early next year. He insisted that the company is on track to hand over at least some of the twin-aisle, folding-wingtip jets to airlines in 2027.
Ortberg said that Boeing is “continuing to tick off the flight tests that are under the approved type inspection authorities” on the 777X program. The airframer has yet to secure ETOPS (extended-range twin-engine operations performance standards) authorization, which establishes guidelines for flying long-haul flights while staying within range of suitable diversion airports in engine-out scenarios. From the perspective of airline customers such as Emirates and Lufthansa Group, securing ETOPS authorization is absolutely vital for deploying the aircraft on international routes.
The delay in securing ETOPS is “related to the mid-seal issue we’ve got with the engine,” Ortberg said.
“Until we get the mid-seal certification plan complete, we can’t get authorization to start ETOPS; we’re expecting that very soon,” he said. “GE is working on that diligently. I think they had to do a little more testing than what we originally planned. I think they’re still confident in the fix, so we’ve got to get that done.”
“Having said that, that’s probably going to cause us a little bit of a challenge between now and the end of the year,” Ortberg added. “We may see some of the testing spill into the next year, and we’re still planning on 2027 deliveries…We’ve still got a lot in front of us on the flight test program; not done until we’re done.”
Curiously, both Boeing and GE Aerospace point at each other when identifying which company has remaining work on ETOPS authorization.
Some industry watchers, such as Richard Aboulafia of the AeroDynamic Advisory, have long anticipated the news that certification of the 777-9 would not happen this year. “I mean, I think a lot of people knew that it was going to slip,” he told Leeham News and Analysis (LNA). “Errors and mistakes committed in the past have a way of traveling to the right and making everything difficult. Even though I think the company’s gotten a lot better over the last 18 months, it’s still haunted by past disasters.”
Indeed, certification of the 777-9—now a full seven years behind the originally stated schedule—has floundered partially as a byproduct of the back-to-back 737 Max crashes of 2018-19, which resulted in more-intense FAA scrutiny and severe delays of Max 7 and Max 10 certification, as well.
Boeing and enginemaker GE Aerospace have also been required to address technical issues with the type’s massive GE9X turbofans—first the form of thrust-link fatigue and then the more recent mid-seal durability problem.
During the Morgan Stanley conference, GE Aerospace’s chief financial officer, Rahul Ghai, described the company’s efforts to resolve the latter issue on the GE9X engines while maintaining that the 777-9 is still tracking to enter service next year.
“Going through the testing of the engine, we found our mid-seal—which is one of the parts that connects the front and the back of the engine—was not as durable as we had expected,” he said. “Which is the reason you test the aircraft.”
Ghai clarified that Boeing and GE Aerospace “does not need a new mid-seal for certification.”
“The plan was, and always has been, that we can have the certification completed with the existing mid-seal; we’ve been working with the FAA to get that done,” he said. “Boeing needs to submit that approval to the FAA along with other approvals they need for TIA [type inspection authorization] complete so they can start ETOPS testing.”
Ghai said that GE Aerospace is taking a supporting role in satisfying those FAA requirements—conflicting somewhat with Ortberg’s characterization of who is handling remaining work.
On the production side, Ghai said, GE Aerospace has developed a new mid-seal for the GE9X, following extensive testing of the less-durable iteration. The company has a “huge degree of confidence that our design will work,” he said, and it has already started shipping GE9X engines with the new mid-seal design to Boeing. FAA certification of the new part should be secured “in the next few months.”
In terms of the overall delivery timeline, Aboulafia said that deliveries are still likely in 2027, though probably not until very late in the year.
“Things would have to be really in bad shape for them not to deliver at least a few planes at some point in 2027,” he said. “Just maybe not as many as expected.”
Of course, there is the open question of which, if any, airlines will take the early production 777-9s Boeing has in storage, or whether at least some of those widebody jets will be disassembled and written off. As LNA has previously reported, Boeing may be facing another “terrible teens” scenario, similar to the problematic early examples on the 787 Dreamliner.
The 777X certification is further threatened by looming labor action. Members of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees (SPEEA) are considering a revised four-year contract offer from Boeing management after rejecting the company’s first proposal. If the sides do not reach an agreement by October 6, the white-collar union would be free to strike. Both sides have expressed optimism that a suitable contract will be reached in time, but some union members have lingering distaste from previous rounds of negotiations and the outcome remains unclear.
It is certain, however, that thousands of engineers walking off the job would be detrimental to Boeing’s certification efforts. A strike would be one of the last things the company needs as it seeks to gain momentum in its recovery and begin generating revenue from the 777X program, which is already seven years behind schedule.
“Let me be clear—we’re working very hard to try to avoid any kind of a work stoppage,” Ortberg said. “That’s our key priority because the impact would be significant. Essentially, the 777 certification program shuts down until we get the engineers back, and it would have a ripple effect into our production.”
He added that Boeing Commercial Airplanes would not be able to sustain current rates of 737 Max production in the event of a lengthy SPEEA strike, let alone hit still-elusive monthly production ramp targets.
“One of the things we did is we agreed with the union to start negotiations early,” Ortberg said. “I think that was wise because we got through this first round and we found out that the agreement that we had with the bargaining unit negotiating team wasn’t what the union wanted.”
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