HANDA, Japan – This is an airplane factory. Green-painted aluminum all around, the deafening rattle of rivet guns, the hot smell of metal rubbing metal as scores of workers in blue-and-white company jump suits drill and bolt together the big center wing boxes for Boeing 777s at a Fuji Heavy Industries factory.
But less than a mile away, in this suburb of Nagoya, Fuji workers are completing an all-new factory for an all-new jet.
Here big plastic pieces of Boeing’s new 787 center wing box will slowly harden in giant pressure ovens, watched over by a handful of technicians.
Where holes need to be drilled, a large machine will do it. The pieces will be wheeled around the factory on a big automated cart that plays gently tinkling, ice-cream-truck versions of popular karaoke tunes.
No noisy rivet guns. Far fewer workers. Soft gentle music. This is a new kind of airplane factory.
The 787 is the Boeing Co.’s first try at an airliner that will be more plastic than metal.
To build it, Boeing is trying a new method. It has turned over most work to its suppliers, and together with them it has set up a global assembly line, with factories on three continents that will be linked by a fleet of dramatically modified 747 cargo jets.
The pieces baked at Fuji’s new Handa factories will be attached to sections fabricated in Italy by another company in South Carolina. Then the whole center section will be flown to Everett, where Boeing workers will snap it together with the rest of the plane and install the finishing touches.
To launch the 747, the plane that brought Boeing to Everett nearly 40 years ago, the company relied on The Incredibles – a proud cadre of engineers and mechanics led by the legendary designer Joe Sutter.
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But to launch the 787, the first jet of the 21st century, Boeing has built an international team led by guys named Mark and Giovanni, Hideyuki and Newt.
“The 787 represents innovation in our industry,” said Vincenzo Caiazzo, the chief executive of Alenia North America, one of Boeing’s big Dreamliner partners. “The 787 represents a breakthrough in the market.
The 787 has also allowed us to build innovative relationships in the supply chain that have never been made in the past.”
Their shirts don’t say Boeing, but they say they couldn’t be prouder to launch the company’s newest jet.
Mark Dickey, the general manager of Vought Aircraft Industries’ 787 plant in South Carolina, tried to explain.
“It’s a dream come true,” he said. “I firmly believe we’re making history and I’m proud to be part of that,” he said.
Global assembly line
To build the 787, Boeing and its partners have invented a whole new assembly method.
Aircraft manufacturing has not changed much since Rosie the Riveter put her hair in a bun, picked up a drill gun and started building the B-17 bombers that her husband flew in World War II.
Then and now, airplanes are built by creating an aluminum skeleton reinforced by steel. These stringers and spars are riveted together, and then large, thin sheets of aluminum are fastened on with more rivets.
Each hole is precisely drilled, some by laser-guided machines developed in recent decades, but many by hand, just the way Rosie did.
Then each hole is filled with a fastener that joins the parts together.
Once the body sections are done, they’re linked together and Boeing factory workers begin stuffing them with insulation and wiring, windows, hydraulic lines and altimeters.
“You look at the 747, it’s like your grandmother’s quilt coming together,” said Charles “Newt” Newton, the general manager of Global Aeronautica in Charleston, S.C.
All that will change with the 787.
The major pieces of the new Dreamliner will be built from composites – a class of materials that includes fiberglass. For the new plane, sheets of graphite fabric will be soaked in plastic resins and then laid down in precise patterns on molds called mandrels. In most cases the machines doing the job will lay tape-like strips.
After that, the pieces will be “bagged” – placed in vacuum tight containers – than baked in autoclaves, which are huge pressure ovens.
The exact cooking times and temperatures are secret, but in the end, the result is the same: a hard aircraft part that’s lighter and stronger than aluminum.
Each of Boeing’s key suppliers – in Asia, Europe and North America – will use largely the same methods and exactly the same materials, said Scott Strode, Boeing’s vice president for 787 production.
“You really do need to have a lot of consistency of process, both in design and build,” he said.
For starters, it’s “a more affordable way,” he said. But also, Boeing wants to maintain some control over the way its airplanes are built.
“It ultimately has the Boeing brand on the side,” Strode said. “We want to make sure that what we deliver, we understand.”
The new material allows for new production methods.
The suppliers won’t rivet together stringers, spars and panels. Instead, they’ll cast entire one-piece “barrels” – entire sections of airplane that are close to 19 feet in circumference and as much as 33 feet long.
As a result, the 787 will have only 60 percent as many parts as its predecessors, Strode said.
Once the sections are completed, other Boeing suppliers will stuff them full of standard equipment – the wiring and insulation that will go inside each plane – and slap on the primer and undercoats of paint.
Then the three major sections will be flown to Everett, where Boeing workers will attach the wings and engines, fasten the rest of the body together and install the custom equipment – seats, galleys and in-flight entertainment systems.
“What we do today on the wide-body airplanes is bring in a large number of subassemblies and do build-up,” Strode said. But with the 787 “they’re coming in as completely integrated pieces. Instead of thousands of inbound pieces all merging their way to final assembly, you have a few very big pieces.”
Work, but no workers
Boeing suppliers are playing a huge role in building the 787, said program chief Mike Bair. “On this airplane, it’s all about the partners.”
Only one major fuselage piece – the vertical fin – is being built in-house, and even portions of that have been outsourced, most notably the leading edge, which will be assembled in China.
That doesn’t sit well with Mark Blondin, the district president for the International Association of Machinists, the union that represents Boeing mechanics.
“There’s a heck of a lot of work that could and should be done in our Auburn and Fredrickson facilities,” he said. “There’s a lot of work down the road but not as many workers.”
By automating much of the manufacturing process, Boeing’s suppliers have cut back on the number of workers they’ll need to build their parts of the 787.
Not all suppliers would disclose their work force projections, but in some cases it was surprisingly small.
Fuji Heavy Industries, for example, will have fewer than two dozen workers fabricating the composite parts for the center wing box, with about 150 more people assembling the parts at the factory next door.
Vought Aircraft Industries and Global Aeronautica will each have about 400 employees in South Carolina by about 2011, executives said. Alenia Aeronautica plans to have about 480 workers in Grottaglie, Italy, by 2008.
By comparison, Boeing officials have said they expect to hire between 850 and 1,200 people to work in Everett assembling the 787.
At the same time, some of the suppliers have built up substantial numbers of employees around Puget Sound. About 180 Italian engineers are here working on the 787, said Antonio Perfetti, the chief operating officer of Alenia Aeronautica.
Blondin said he’s willing to concede a share of the work, when and where it makes sense.
“We’re cognitive to the fact that Japan buys a lot of aircraft and they have been partners in previous aircraft,” he said. “They’ve invested a lot in this project. They’re going to get their share.”
Blondin even praised the way key suppliers such as Kawasaki and Mitsubishi deal with their workers.
“They’ve got comparable wages and benefits and working conditions, and job security, totally,” he said. “They haven’t had layoffs in 26 years.”
But at the same time, Boeing developed in Seattle the composite manufacturing processes that will be used around the world, with the help of Machinist union members.
“They made the decision to outsource that,” he said. Obviously, we were not pleased.”
Some significant 787 parts are going to be built in Snohomish County – but not by Boeing workers.
One of the first partners named to the program was C&D Zodiak of Marysville, the former Northwest Composites. The company will build key pieces of the new jet’s interior, and deliver them to the Boeing Interiors Responsibility Center in Everett.
Panasonic Avionics Corp., which has headquarters in Bothell, is one of two companies providing in-flight entertainment systems for the 787. And Goodrich Corp. is building a new factory in south Everett where it will assemble engine mountings and combine them with the engines and other structures before delivering them to the Boeing factory down the street.
“There’s a lot of work gone out to hundreds and hundreds of vendors – non-union of course,” Blondin said. “All you’re getting there is a low-pay, no-benefit work force.”
Boeing officials defend their decision to send parts work around the globe.
All around the world
“It’s not about foreign versus U.S. for us,” said Strode. “It’s about taking advantage of what these global companies have to offer.”
The sheer size of the 787 program is the strongest argument against having all of it in one location, Strode said. Between them, the major parts suppliers have built seven new factories while expanding an eighth.
“It’s hard for me to imagine a location where we’d put all that investment,” Strode said. “I don’t know where in Everett we would do that.”
And it’s not like Boeing hasn’t done something like this in the past, he continued. Vought, for example, builds almost the entire fuselage for 747s at its plants in California and Texas, then ships them to Everett.
By including Alenia and the Japanese Heavies in the mix this time, Boeing has tapped companies with solid experience in building parts very much like the ones they’re building for the Dreamliner.
Both Mitsubishi and Kawasaki Heavy Industries were contractors on the F-2 fighter, which has composite wing boxes like the ones Mitsubishi is building for the 787. And Alenia builds a composite horizontal stabilizer for its ATR-72 that is similar to the set of rear fins it will provide for the Dreamliner.
“There are tremendous capabilities,” Strode said.
Farming work out globally means Boeing has been able to get the 787 to market faster than if it had tried to hire all the people it would have needed to do the work itself, Bair said.
It also spread out the economic risk, by bringing more companies in at the start and reducing the amount of start-up cash Boeing would have to contribute. The governments of Italy and Japan also are believed to have helped their companies with cash for research and development.
Finally, analysts say it’s no coincidence that the company won major launch orders from Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways after agreeing to have Fuji, Kawasaki and Mitsubishi be major 787 suppliers.
It’s simply smart business to share the wealth this way, Strode said.
“We sell these airplanes all over the world,” he added. “So we do business all over the world.”
Blondin’s not convinced.
“You give so much control to so many different suppliers,” he said. “Can they guarantee they can keep up? I know the IAM workers will.”
It’s hard to be simple
One day last month, Strode led a group of journalists to Fuji’s new 787 factories. There he saw for the first time the first piece of the first 787, the jet he’s responsible for building.
It was the curved lower panel of the center wing box, a big piece of black composite with reinforcing ribs baked on in the autoclave. It’s a simple piece, yet it represents so much investment of time, money and talent, marveled Boeing spokeswoman Lori Gunter.
“There are thousands of engineers who’ve had a part of this and they’ve never seen this,” she said. “It’s part of history. It’s amazing.”
Next door in the 777 factory, workers had finished riveting together the corresponding center wing box panel for the older Boeing plane.
“It’s obviously very capable,” Strode said. “But contrast it to the design simplicity we saw on the composite side.”
The Fuji Heavy Industries executives showed obvious pride in what they’d accomplished.
“The center wing section is the center portion of the aircraft,” said Hideyuki Sano, Fuji’s general manager for Boeing projects. That means their work is at the very heart of the Dreamliner, he said.
His colleague, 787 program manager Yasuhiro Toi, said words failed him – at least in English.
“Many words,” Toi said, when asked how it felt when they finished the first part. “I can’t choose at this moment.”
Strode harkened back to the day in December 2003 when the Boeing board of directors decided to go ahead with the mostly composite airframe.
“I think back … all the studies, all the designing, all the arguments … then to see all that yield itself into that assembly,” he said. “It looks like a fairly simple thing. It’s all of that time and energy and thought to make it that simple.
“The simpler it looks the harder it is to design,” he concluded.
Now the challenge is to get the plane built. The first flight is only 13 months away.
Strode acknowledged some nervousness. “I’m not going to be comfortable with our schedule, because it’s tight,” he said.
Plus, he noted, Boeing must now manage the global assembly line it’s created.
There will be problems at the start, he predicted, and something’s bound to go wrong. But Boeing and its partners are ready for that, Strode continued. There are Boeing people in Italy and Japan. There are Japanese and Italian engineers in Everett. Everyone’s in constant communication.
“I’m confident in our partners’ ability,” he said. “We have the ability to help solve the problem or deal with the consequences of the problem.”
At a recent meeting with reporters, Bair said he had one simple message for the world about Boeing’s new 787.
“It’s real,” he said, “and it’s going to be here quickly.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
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