The Contour Aerospace facility in Everett is less than a mile from the Boeing Co.’s 787 final assembly line, and from Paine Field, where the new Dreamliner will take its first flight.
Manager Gary Broda and his crew have already done their part — machining the 39-foot-long aluminum spar that sits on the leading edge of the vertical stabilizer. Now, Broda said, they’re ready to celebrate.
“We’re going to get somebody on high ground somewhere to watch for it,” he said. “We’ll probably have a lunch cook-off, too.”
Aerospace workers across Snohomish County will toast that first flight — many of them people who draw paychecks from companies other than Boeing. According to AirFramers.com, the list of suppliers includes:
n Electroimpact of Mukilteo, which provided automated fastening, drilling and machine tools for building the plane.
n C&D Zodiak of Marysville, which is providing composite pieces for the plane’s interior, as well as cargo liners.
n Panasonic Avionics of Bothell, which is one of the suppliers of in-flight entertainment systems.
n B/E Aerospace of Florida, which has an engineering office in Marysville, is supplying galley inserts for the 787.
In addition, Korry Electronics of Seattle, which is supplying cockpit electronics for the 787, plans to move into a new 216,000-square-foot facility at Paine Field this fall.
Initially, local officials thought that a lot of 787 suppliers — like Korry — would be coming to Snohomish County to be close to Boeing’s final assembly operation. A handful have, like Messier-Dowty and Messier-Bugatti, French companies that are supplying the landing gear and brakes, respectively. So has Goodrich, which built a 144,000-square-foot plant where it takes the fuel-efficient General Electric GEnex and Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines and builds the engine coverings and air inlets around them.
But the list of suppliers who decided against moving here is even longer.
The first — and possibly biggest — fish to get away was the Global Aeronautica pre-assembly plant.
At a 2004 meeting of Northwest aerospace suppliers, Boeing’s head of supplier management for what was then the 7E7 told industry leaders that he foresaw major facilities coming to Everett, where the companies supplying major sections of the 787 — companies like Dallas-based Vought Aircraft Industries and Italy’s Alenia Aeronautica — would put all their pieces together before delivering them to Boeing.
It would be far easier doing that than trying to deliver “fully stuffed sections” from far-flung factories, said Boeing’s Ren Nansted.
That news excited state and local development officials — and reassured them, said John Monroe, the Snohomish County Economic Development Council’s aerospace point man. “Everybody relaxed,” he recalled recently. The attitude was “we’ll wait for this stuff to happen and find out who’s going to be doing this.
“Unfortunately, the state of Washington was never considered for that subassembly site.”
Instead, it went to Charleston, S.C., where state and local officials had put together a quietly effective campaign touting its cheap industrial land, access to seaports, rail lines and big airports, lower non-union wages, workers experienced in building cars using the same kind of design software used by the aerospace industry — and more than $116 million in cash grants and tax breaks, which went a long way toward offsetting the $560 million Vought and Alenia would end up spending to build two factories there. South Carolina also promised to kick in up to $44 million more if the companies’ joint venture, Global Aeronautica, hit specific job-creation targets.
Whether that was a wise move has been debated ever since. The Charleston operation has been blamed for a lot of the problems that have put the 787 program two years behind schedule, Boeing ended up having to buy out Vought’s share of the venture, and the Machinists union quickly organized the South Carolina work force and began negotiating for higher wages.
Boeing should have forced those suppliers to move closer to Everett, a frustrated Mike Bair said in a speech days after he was replaced as Boeing’s chief of the 787 program.
It might be hard to convince suppliers such as the “Japanese Heavies” — Fuji Heavy Industries, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries — to build factories in Washington state, Bair said, but it shouldn’t be “outside the realm of what has to be done.”
State and local officials have continued talks with several key suppliers about moving to Everett, or elsewhere in Washington. Some suppliers, including at least one major one, seem interested, they say. But the delays in getting the first plane in the air and in getting the production line up to full speed have made them cautious.
Those talks ended altogether this spring when analysts started suggesting that Boeing would open a second 787 line in Texas, Monroe said.
“The phones have gone dead,” he said. “This whole discussion is put on hold until Boeing makes a decision on the second line.”
Meanwhile, the suppliers who are here say they’re happy.
“Could we have stayed in California and done this? Absolutely,” said Dave Kaupke, the general manager of Goodrich’s new Aerostructures Integration Services plant in Everett. “But this is much better.”
“I won’t say we couldn’t have done it, but there’s a real advantage to being up here with your customer to see what they’re looking for and be able to respond in real time,” he said. “We can be there in 20 minutes.”
Goodrich has about 30 people working here now, and expects that will climb to 80 as Boeing cranks up 787 production rates. The Dreamliner’s delays have complicated things, Kaupke said, but on balance, “we definitely made the right decision to come up and invest in the property and put the building up.”
On the other hand, Contour’s plant was in Everett before the 787, and the spar it manufactures for the vertical stabilizer in the tail is only a tiny fraction of the work it does for Boeing — less than 1 percent, Broda said.
Unlike Goodrich, which assembles components from around Europe and North America and then ships them to the Boeing plant down the road, Contour produces a spar here that gets shipped to China, where another supplier, Shenyang Aircraft, incorporates it into the leading edge of the tail fin, then ships it back to Boeing’s plant in Fredrickson near Puyallup. Boeing workers assemble the tail fin there, then ship it to Everett.
Broda said his team is excited about being part of such a groundbreaking plane program.
“The employees are really pumped about it,” Broda said. “Our machinists are very proud of what they produce.
“Everybody’s excited to be able to have a piece of the new technology and that new airplane,” he added. “We had to have a piece of it — can’t be in the business and not supply a piece of the 787.”
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