Boeing's 787 Dreamliner is still on track for first flight this fall and delivery in the third quarter of 2009, but manufacturing issues are cutting into the extra margin Boeing built into the schedule.

At a briefing Tuesday for the world's media at the Farnborough Air Show, program chief Pat Shanahan said completing the midbody sections of Dreamliners No. 1 and 2, now on the assembly line in Everett, is the main issue putting pressure on the schedule to get the first airplane into the air.

Before No. 1 can fly, No. 2 must be completed for ground verification tests that are a prerequisite for first flight, Shanahan said.

The Dreamliner schedule revised this spring gave him some margin for such issues, "and I've been eating some of that up with completing the midbody" on No. 2, which still needed a lot of work when it arrived in Everett, Shanahan said. "I'm eating margin I don't want to eat."

The midbody of Dreamliner No. 4 is still in Charleston, S.C., and will arrive as much as three weeks later than planned after manufacturing glitches at the Global Aeronautica supplier plant there.

That section was supposed to arrive in Everett, almost complete, by the end of June.

But the upper part of the 85-foot long fuselage section was damaged last month when a mechanic misdrilled holes.

Afterward, the factory shut down for a day for mandatory training after an audit by the Federal Aviation Administration found that mechanics were not following required procedures.

Global Aeronautica is a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Alenia of Italy.

Many of the permanent workers there are new to aerospace manufacturing, and the work force is supplemented by contract mechanics from all over the U.S. and from the supplier partners in Italy and Japan.

"The experience level [in Charleston] isn't the same as in Everett," Shanahan said.

He said the main problem has been incomplete work coming into Global Aeronautica from its suppliers. The site lacks the engineering resources that Everett has to deal with the problems that creates, he said.

Shanahan also said the brake-monitoring system identified in May as problematic won't be fixed for some months yet.

The problem is a certification issue: The software that monitors the brakes doesn't have the complete development documentation that's needed to be certified.

"It's not that the brakes don't work," Shanahan reassured his audience jokingly.

The supplier — a unit of GE that has subcontracted the system to Crane Aerospace — "had to go back and rewrite portions to verify the development of the software," he said.

"I am confident, because this is GE, that it will get done," Shanahan added.

Such problems are typical and inevitable, and yet unpredictable, in any airplane development program, he said, shrugging them off with humor.

For those that are behind on the certification track, "we have after-school detention on Saturday," he said.

After the news conference, Shanahan characterized his troubleshooting leadership role as "a great game of whack-a-mole."