With only four days to go before a major regularly scheduled investor briefing in the US, Boeing is rolling out more admissions of failure about the 787 Dreamliner program.

This is the key section of a story on the Arabian Business site, quoting the companies President and CEO for Commercial Airplanes, Jim Albaugh, at a conference in Riyadh.

“Some of the technology was not as mature as it should have been and we put a global supply chain together without thinking through some of the consequences,” said Jim Albaugh, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said at an investment conference in Riyadh.

“When you put immature technology in your supply chain and don’t supply adequate oversight, you have issues and that what we had.

“That said, it is going to be a magnificent airplane and will be 20 percent more efficiency than the airplanes it is replacing.”

Let’s deal with the last comment.

This claimed 20 percent improvement in efficiency has been punted around by Boeing since it began a large scale campaign of  consistently unsubstantiated announcements about the benefits and status of the project in 2005 at the Paris Air Show, just over two years before it rolled out a sham prototype of the jet and then claimed it would make its first flight by the end of September 2007 for deliveries starting in May 2008.

It has persisted with a policy of making statements that were either knowingly false or totally ignorant of the realities of the program that should have been known in abundant detail to the company since that orchestrated and gratuitous abuse of trust at the July 8, 2007 unveiling.

Perhaps the next phase of this dismal record is to begin breaking the news that the net benefits of this plastic airliner project are less than claimed,  even when it is more than three years late, an area of concern that also hangs over the Airbus A350 project.