COBI Boeing 787 Dreamliner Set 26603

COBI's Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner is a 1:110 model built from 836 blocks, 51.5 cm long, with rotating wheels, retracting landing gear and engines with turning fans. A pilot and a passenger figure are included. All markings are printed; the set contains no stickers.

The fuselage is one piece of plastic

Every airliner before the 787 was built the way ships are: thousands of aluminium panels riveted to a frame. Boeing built the 787's fuselage as a small number of complete carbon-fibre barrels, wound on enormous mandrels and cured in an autoclave, then joined end to end. There are no longitudinal seams and roughly 80 per cent fewer fasteners.

The reason passengers notice is not weight. Aluminium fatigues when it is repeatedly pressurised and depressurised, so airliners have always been kept at a cabin altitude of around 8,000 feet and dried to very low humidity, because moisture corrodes the airframe from inside. Carbon fibre does neither.

So the 787 pressurises to 6,000 feet and runs its cabin at about twice the humidity of an older aircraft. The difference is real — less dehydration, less headache, less of the flattened feeling after a long flight — and it is the one improvement in modern airliners that a passenger can feel without being told about it.

In the COBI range

Part of the 1:110 airliner collection with the Boeing 737-8 (26608).

Specifications

Pieces: 836 · Figures: 2 · Scale: 1:110 · No stickers
Model dimensions: 51.5 × 17.5 cm (20.3 × 6.9 in)