I must say I am concerned about the use of quite this much composite material in the 787. At the moment of course, Boeing seem to have the upper hand over Airbus in this market area but of course neither a 787 or an A350/A370 have been fully built or flown yet.

My main concerns are over the durability of the material and its joins over what we have now come to expect as the typical lifetime of a commercial aircraft which is 20-30 years of fairly intensive operation.

When I was stuyding engineering at university, one of my coursemates was doing a project on the fatigue life of [supposedly identical] carbon fibre samples and I remember him saying he was disappointed he couldnt find any pattern to his results. Achieving consistancy of manufacture is one of the greatest difficulties with composite materials, the presence of voids being somethign that is meant to be very tightly controlled for aerospace applications.

Of course people like something new (ok, except maybe on this particular part of the forum 😀 ) so aircraft like the Starship 10/15 years ago and the 787 now have great appeal, but to my mind composites raise as many questions (at the moment) as they provide answers. No doubt though some good work is being done by materials scientists around the world and these problems will be overcome.