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NEW YORK: US plane maker Boeing raised doubts Tuesday that the first flight of its newest jet, the 787 Dreamliner, would take place as scheduled later this year because of a strike by machinists.
"If the strike is going on, we can't try the 787 at the end of the year like we planned. We need the full team on board," Boeing spokesman Tim Healy told AFP on Tuesday.
He refused to discuss the possibility of more delays to deliveries of the state-of-the-art aircraft, saying only that the company would assess the impact of the strike when it ended.
"Alas I can't tell you when this strike is going to end," he said.
Boeing's 27,000 machinists, who represent 16 per cent of the company's workforce, went on strike on September 6 after the collapse of three-year contract talks.
The strike has forced Boeing to halt aircraft production and could be costing the US aerospace giant more than 100 million dollars per day, analysts say.
The first deliveries of the 787, initially planned for the first half of 2008, have been pushed back to the third quarter of 2009. Any further delays in the schedule would damage Boeing's reputation and risk antagonizing clients.
A spokesman for the union leading the strike action, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), said the organization was in daily contact with a federal mediator but had no direct contact with Boeing management.
He underlined that one of the assembly sites for the 787 in Everett in Washington state had been affected by the strike.
The Dreamliner, Boeing's first new model in over a decade, takes advantage of the huge advances made in aviation technology in the past decade, and was designed using high-tech plastic composites instead of aluminum.
- AFP/yt
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