Perhaps we can all get together and have a cake. At the same time, contract talks with the second-largest union—the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace SPEEA , representing engineers and technicians—were getting off to a rocky start.
In the midst of this tension came a report from well-respected and oft-quoted aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia. The reason, he said: labor strife. Over the years, Boeing management has shown that it knows as much about labor relations as the producers of Predator III knew about science fiction. But it appears management is moving to the next stage.
After decades of butting heads with the machinists and other unions, Boeing management is fed up, Aboulafia said. Outsourced major airframe sections will continue to be shifted to multiple locations, either abroad or to right-to-work states. As author Sell points out, Boeing has often considered relocating its major final assembly centers when it launched new airplane programs.
Boeing looked hard at sites in Ohio and Kansas and had even taken an option on land in the San Francisco Bay Area, before reluctantly concluding that it would be too hard to convince enough key personnel to relocate. And in , Boeing conducted a high-profile, nationwide site selection search for a new home for the The company was believed to be leaning toward locations in North Carolina, Alabama and Texas—all right-to-work states dangling attractive cash incentives—before then-Governor Gary Locke now U.
That tax break evened out the higher costs of doing business in Washington and let Boeing make the decision it wanted to make all along—building the plane in Everett, says Walt Gillette, the executive in charge of developing what would become the About the only time Boeing has moved a major business unit away was in , when it shifted headquarters to Chicago.
But tellingly, only about half of the executives and support staffers Boeing offered to move to Chicago took the jobs. Corporations have been able to increase their profits by offloading low-skill work to places where wages are cheap.
All these factors reinforce the new manufacturing paradigm epitomized by General Electric Co. But the problem with outsourcing is that it works much better on flow charts and spreadsheets than on the factory floor. And it ignores the fact that skilled labor is also an asset.
While Boeing management argues that outsourcing lowers its costs, Sell is doubtful. There must be some middle ground upon which Boeing and its unions can agree. While we agree with the basic premise, we have become convinced that Boeing went a step or several steps too far. The same machinists who walked out against Boeing in Seattle last year helped organize a union at the new plants in South Carolina.
The airplane industry in Texas is heavily unionized, and so are the plants run by key Boeing suppliers like Vought Aircraft Industries. The model has shown that it takes a fair amount of highly skilled individuals to manufacture a plane, Merluzaeu argues.
Manufacturing of the first began May 1, and it rolled out the factory door just 16 months later — making world headlines and landing a page in the history books. It paved the way for the , and the Dreamliner. Over , people visit the Everett Site each year to see how wide-body jets with millions of parts and miles of wiring synchronize like a symphony to produce a work of art in flight. Overview History Quick Facts. Quick Facts. The is an impressive feet Approximately 3, airplanes combined of the , , and models have delivered to customers around the world.
Unless BCA can establish some of the new processes on sub assemblies etc in WA in advance of the new model. Tesla gets ahead not by paying the lowest salaries.. Tesla is moving HQ to Texas and Musk has already personally moved. This was triggered by CA refusal to allow the Fremont production line to operate. No reasonable manager would put any kind of production in CA.
Theres 15, employees at Fremont , which you say doesnt operate. Tesla had the same grand designs of mainly robots and few human workers….. Disruption is a two edged sword as most of these entrepreneurs soon find out. The poster did not say Musk was moving car production out of California, though that is inevitable IMO. Boeing had learnt that the hard way. You mean the registered office?
Or where the board meets? Elon can set up a new campus. Young coders want the social life in big cities, people with families want low housing costs, better schools, and safer communities. WA state beware. Indeed, both Sony and Toyota are on public record as saying quality is better in its US plants than Japanese plants albeit not a lot I suppose given high quality there One manufacturer of computer disk drives kept producing in the SW US, it gave an example of flexibility: when a change was made, employees were brought in for Saturday morning go-through, with a bonus of lunch, then Monday morning started producing the new way.
If producing outside of North America it would take several weeks to change. For years Hutchison Technologies was producing small parts for disk drives, had good values as BBandT.
It was so good that an east Asian drive maker bought HT. On that basis, even the best management team would be seeking to reduce Boeing exposure to Puget Sound.
Moses Lake would have been a great place to setup the line. Lots of space unlimited used extensively for testing and other ops Spacejet at one time as well as training. Unlimited place for people to live in whatever general type area that suited them. Fantastic power rates in the right districts. Commuting from the places you mention, and Ellensberg which is a nice college town just off I east of the passes, is a hike to Moses Lake in winter.
Moses Lake has foreign airlines training regularly, though the SW US may be better for flight testing. It took a while, but thanks in large part to Boeing itself it worked. Step One moving hq to Chicago. And they cold re-locate Renton to Everett and sell off Renton. That is a horribly crowed location and small airport to start with and I marvel they can get a plane out the end of and onto a runway.
That includes all the surrounding office buildings and property. Easily done one line at a time now. Sell of Renton, that is some huge bucks in extremely valuable real estate. Uh, TW, why move out of Renton when its current model in production has a relatively limited future and Boeing does not know what its new project will be? One factor not to overlook is the P-8 warplane line, albeit much lower production rate than it hopes to get back to for MAX.
The P-8 is an armed surveillance airplane used by USN and foreign militaries, it has cousins purchased by militaries for other uses. The P-8 illustrates benefits of competition in the face of botches. In Seattle, Amazon occupies 40 buildings, with a headcount over 40, and fights with Starbucks, Google and Facebook to fill openings. Go figure. Denver is in the center of the US. UPS was long established somewhere before it woke up to the air courier business that Fred Smith pioneered despite naysayers.
With that option gone, what recourse does a customer have when it has this type of issue? Does it just keep on refusing an airframe during the customer acceptance inspection, eventually forcing its will upon Boeing?
For example, does there come a point where mediation kicks in? I think Qatar only refused to take from Charleston in the beginning, later Qatar took them but they checked every inch. Time will tell if Boeing can fix the issues. Emirates might not even want to change to anymore, they could wait it out.
That list is depressing and alarming. I thought the Charleston issues were limited to FOD and some tolerance issues, but this defies belief. Unfathomable that all manufacture is now being entrusted to apparent Neanderthals.
Federal Aviation Administration after Air Canada notified them of the fuel leak. Workers at a Dreamliner plant in South Carolina have complained of defective manufacturing, debris left on planes and pressure to not report violations. You are delusional [Edited]. SC is heaven compared to cold, wet, gloomy, unhappy, unfriendly WA State. They got to name Business Schools after these fellows.
They must have read the Shock Doctrine! Look at the new way they decided to go with the Dreamliner. How long was this facility open, how much staff, and what did they spend that much money on? All I ever heard were reports of an auto-riveting experiment. It was a testbed for fuselage assembly techniques. Boeing bought the building former marine storage warehouse in , and employed about 25 people there.
Probably reused elsewhere at Being when the building closed. While building closures likely reflect some scaling back of programs, they result in relocation, not in the programs stopping altogether. The other way round. Airbus designed and produced automated fuselage panel joins and barrel sections before the first A rollout back in The X wasnt announced till then and they reckoned they would have to compete on automated assembly , but not so easy for existing metal designs.
It works for them, says Jessica Kinman, a senior manager for Dassault Systemes. Point being that the facility was opened for a specific research purpose and program, and was closed when it ended. The program was estimated to take one or two years in So more or less an expected event for the building to close.
As Duke noted, that system resulted in higher rates of rework than was possible with lesser automation. The robotic system was designed and built by KUKA in Germany, with the goal of being able to handle every size and shape of fastener that was needed as the 4 coordinated robots traversed the fuselage 2 inside, 2 outside. But in practice, precision was a function of the fastener.
This is the same problem Tesla had with initial fully automated assembly of the Model 3. The solution there, as at Boeing, was to relegate some high-precision tasks to workers. The current fuselage assembly is still automated and innovative, and retains many elements of FAUB, but a different robot built by ElcctroImpact in Everett, now traverses the outside to drill, insert and seal, while workers now finish the fasteners from inside.
Boeing noted there was no change in total workforce. The Airbus fuselage lines also use the ElecrtroImpact system, in addition to other robots at other stages of assembly. Boeing also uses different automated methods for those other stages. Seattle Times: What Boeing will certainly lose by parceling out the ADC work is a centralized location where the top machinists and engineers inside Commercial Airplanes work together on innovative hands-on technology.
It was then used for commercial applications of composite materials and x. The commercial composites work had been reduced to 30 people, as the development activity has been reduced and shifted elsewhere. There is not a compelling reason to sustain it at that facility at present. As other publications have noted, composites are now considered mainstream rather than exotic or developmental.
Boeing has other facilities and suppliers that routinely produce composite materials and parts. They have capability and facilities elsewhere now to continue research and development. Boeing wants to replace workers. Other manufacturers go for assisting their workforce with robots. You may be confusing various items of reusable equipment, and that some of the technology I being used in assembly if I understand correctly, with the specific tool that did not work out.
Pedro, they tried, which is what pontificators want them to do with the far larger investment of a new airplane design. Maybe its time for Boeing to go private with Tesla founder Elon Musk leading a group investors With his vision he can save the company from itself Boeing is still trying to sell a Ford Mustang with a new engine e. Boeing is technically insolvent. In contrast, SpaceX is a magnificent contribution to space technology.
I doubt Musk would be interested in aviation, because it would conflict with the hype of his hyperloop project no pun intended. And yet, both aviation and the hyperloop seek to propel tubular vehicles at high speed through a low-pressure environment…but aviation has the advantage of not-requiring route-specific track infrastructure on the ground.
Where is the money going to come from: barely will BA survive in current market, handouts from DoD maybe. For the Boeing redid some composite structures work from B-2 days, to make sure that export of technology rules would not be applied, even though it was by then old technology.
Administered by constipated bureaucrats IME. Remember how Obama saved the US auto industry in Or less likely perhaps Boeing will try to issue convertible bonds with an attractive coupon rate Even less likely: if Musk or Besos, who knows? They are not going to get any public money that does not have conditions now and we have seen how they respond. But why should gvmt relaunch BCA?
Motor industry they may have thought was too many workers, too long a national pride, besides it was an actual industry as opposed to the stunted remainder.
US gvmt can not organise to onshore as far as I know vital medical manufacturing, reclaim anything of all the industrial base they offloaded to first Japan, then Sth K, then China, then…. BA is pretty much all that is left of commercial plane making, they, the money and the power people, let the rest of the industry go.
Under such circumstances, when rationale takes a back seat to sentiment, anything is possible. Plus, Boeing is a big employer, and used to be an export champion in the US. And the yanks would shudder at the thought of conceding passenger airliner manufacturing defeat to the Europeans and Chinese if BCA were just allowed to bite the dust.
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