Conference Call Coverage - 9:57 AM

9:57am EDT

Good morning all.

I just joined the call and was welcomed by the sound of elevator music. By my watch, this should be getting underway in the next three minutes. In case you missed it, James Wallace at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published an article today detailing that the first flight may slip to November. Most notably He confirmed the content of the piece I published Tuesday:

In addition to this travel work that shifted from partners to final assembly in Everett, the large composite 787 sections of the first plane arrived in Everett with tens of thousands of temporary fasteners because of an industrywide fastener shortage.

They must all be replaced with permanent ones before the plane can fly. That has become far more time-consuming than Boeing initially thought.

One issue is the time it is taking mechanics in Everett to locate many of the temporary fasteners. They are supposed to be painted red for easy identification.

But Boeing has had to follow a tedious paper trail to document where many of the temporary fasteners were placed by its partners.

Jon Ostrower, who runs an aviation Web site called Flightblogger, posted a story Tuesday that quoted sources as saying that the removal of the temporary fasteners damaged some of the composite parts of the aircraft, causing time-consuming repairs.

Sources confirmed the report to the P-I.