Watching the evolution of the Boeing 787 play out in real time has been nothing short of fascinating. The Industrial Designer in me has been really enjoying seeing Boeing break away from the same tired aircraft designs of the last 50 years – and it seems to be getting better with each new variant.
As you will see in my 787-9 templates below, the original 787-8 Dreamliner is an aircraft that lends itself well to a bit of stretching and pulling. Longer versions of it aren’t looking weird. Yet…
Boeing 787-9 side view blueprints (and all white templates)
So yeah. All I had to do was stretch my original 787-8 template a bit to create these 787-9 drawings. It wasn’t even all that much of a stretch actually. Just a couple hours in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop was all that was needed to get it wrapped up.
Fully editable 5000 x 3000 px high-resolution source files for these templates are available! Get them in JPG, PNG, PSD, and vector format.
As different as it looks compared to the -8, the -9 variant isn’t even the longest 787 Dreamliner in Boeing’s lineup. The 787-10 18′ longer, and as you might image, looks a bit too stretched. That’s my opinion anyway.
787-9 design details
I’m going to be a bit honest and tell you that I had to take some wild freaking guesses when it came to illustrating the part lines on the fuselage of this aircraft. I haven’t been able to find detailed assembly drawings for the 787-9, so the part lines that you see in my illustrations may not be entirely accurate.
- I don’t claim any of my illustrations to be perfect, so this is going to have to do (for now). I’ll update these drawings sometime in the future when I run across a more detailed depiction of the sectioning.
- The flat nose of the -9 (and all Dreamliner aircraft) gives the fuselage more of a “cigar” shape than other airplanes in this category. It’s a design detail that made me wrinkle my nose at first, but as the years have gone on, I’ve grown to like it.
- The -9 features a double main bogey (just like the -8). From a visual design point of view, a triple would have helped to balance out the middle section of the aircraft better IMHO. Even if they had to make the individual wheels smaller.
- The wings and vertical stabler of the 787-9 are exactly the same size as what is found on the 787-8.
A visual comparison of the 787-9 vs the 787-10 and 787-8
The best way to compare the way the 787-9 looks compared to other Dreamliners is to show them side by side. Which is easy to do since I’ve already created side view templates for all of them:
As you can see, the 787-9 is sized right in between the 787-10 and 787-8. It makes those other two variants seem oddly-proportioned IMHO, which is something I never really noticed until I took the time to make these drawings.
Your templates and liveries are really beautiful do you reckon you could find time to do a 757 i would love to be able to one of your templates to make my own. great stuff
As a matter of fact, I just finished templates of the 757-200 and I will be posting them very soon. Look for them sometime in the next few days!
Hi Scott, great work 🙂
It seems at this stage, Boeing is avoiding 787-8 sales, because commonality with the 787-9/-10 is 40% only.
The 787-9s are much more mature / popular. It could be that when Boeing has sold the 787-8’s on order, they go back and make a 787-8 mk2, having 90% commonality with the 787-9/-10. And maybe adding ~2 meters / seatrows longer to improve market attractiveness and improve airframe efficiency. Could you create such a 787-8 stretch / 787-9 shrink? I would discuss it at the large aviation forums & link to the illustration at Norebbo. Rgds
Thanks! Interesting idea about a 787 stretch – I hadn’t thought of that before, but yes, that makes sense. I’d love to help but I’m so backed up on other projects right now (including trying to finish the A340 series) – there’s just not enough time in the day, unfortunately. If I were you I’d bring this up on Airliners.net – it would be interesting to see what everyone there thinks about this.
Great template. When are you uploading a template of the Boeing 787-10?
Thanks! I’m actually still trying to collect good reference material for it right now. There’s not much out there quite yet…
can you try a mc-21 soon?
great drawings-just one minor nitpick on the 787-9
the 787-9 forward fuselage has a gap in the window band just forward of the 2nd door [where the frame extension is put in]
from the forward door, it’s 9 windows, a 1 window gap, 5 windows, then the 2nd door
some airlines blank out the window closest to the 2nd door, so that there is only 4 windows
some airlines also blank out the 1st window behind the 1 door
for the -10, the 5 window extension is just forward of the 2nd door, & looks like in front of the rear door
Hi Scott, I don’t want to bother you, I wanted to ask if you can increase the quality of the “A330neo blank illustration” and make an A330neo for TAP air Portugal, please, Thank you
No worries! I always appreciate suggestions and recommendations. Note that I do update my templates from time to time, so that one will get a refresh at some point. The TAP A330neo will happen eventually as well, but I have no immediate plans for it. I have too many other things that I need to take care of first…