Print edition: 
More than 1,100 workers who helped build the Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner toured the aircraft Saturday as its worldwide tour made a stop in Wichita.
“It’s something they’ve been working on for last several years, and this is the fulfillment of everything they’ve been doing,” said George Maffeo, a Boeing vice president who is working on the 787 project.
With more than 800 of the Dreamliners on order, Wichita workers will be involved in the project for the next several years, said Terry George, Spirit AeroSystems’ 787 director of operations.
“We’re talking many decades of flying and building aircraft,” he said.
Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita builds the 787’s nose section and pylons.
Maffeo and George led a media tour of the aircraft late Saturday as it sat outside a Boeing hangar on South Oliver.
The airplane has larger windows and more space in overhead bins than other Boeing aircraft, and it is designed to provide air pressure and humidity levels that more closely resemble those on the ground.
Mike Bryan of Seattle, who flew the Dreamliner to Wichita, said the engineering on the aircraft makes it safer. If the aircraft blows a tire or loses an engine on takeoff, he said, it becomes “a small event” for the pilot.
For a large aircraft, he said, the Dreamliner feels nimble to a pilot.
“It flies beautifully,” he said.
Although the first deliveries have yet to be made to American air carriers, more than 100,000 people have flown on the five 787s that are in service in Japan, Maffeo said.
The Dreamliner, which will be in Wichita until Monday, is on its second leg of a tour that already has taken it as far away as Africa. Maffeo the response so far has been positive. He said the airplane evokes one of two words for most people.
"One is 'fantastic,' and the other is 'wow, this is really cool,'" he said.
