The Boeing Company will take a $1 billion charge because of delays and added engineering costs on its widebody 747-8 program. The design took longer to complete than the company expected, and because of that, last-minute changes are being made later that the company intended, boosting design costs and forcing Boeing to pay its suppliers more to make those changes, the company said in a news release. the 747-8's first flight is now expected in early 2010, with deliveries by the end of 2010. Other than information about the charge on the 747-8 program, Boeing did not release any other financial information today.

Also today, Boeing released its most recent aircraft delivery figures. So far in 2009, the company has delivered 359 commercial aircraft, of which 113 were completed since July 1. No surprise, the leader in deliveries by a wide margin is the Boeing 737, with 280 coming off the production lines so far this year. On the military and defense side, the company delivered 36 variants of the F/A-18 fighter and 20 new Apache helicopters, along with smaller numbers of several other models.