Boeing 787 Dreamliner

Unfortunately Canberra, no. They are more resistant as stated, and are more resistant to conventional cracks as well (damage tolerance), at least partly due to their makeup of having lots of individual fibres in a resin matrix. However they are also prone to different failure modes such as delaminations and inter-laminar failures (i.e. between individual layers of cloth). Another issue is that, whilst very good in an initial impact, this damages the surface layers and makes them much more prone to failure from a subsequent impact - materials such as Kevlar have better properties in this area even though their initial strength is less than carbon.

On balance though the static strength per unit weight is better with CFRP than for conventional Aluminium alloy and the fatigue and damage tolerance properties are in general no worse, hence the shift to CFRP for primary structures. The slow uptake in airliners has been due to a mixture of general conservatism, being happy that the manufacturing processes can provide consistent material strength values, and ensuring consistent joint strengths. The ability to do repairs is another issue (e.g. when another ground vehicle on the apron drives into a wing) - much simpler and better controlled with Aluminium up to now.