Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [83]
In early December 2006 Boeing held a “virtual” roll-out celebration at its Everett site to mark the key role being played behind the scenes by Dassault Systèmes and other production system suppliers. Up to a year had probably been saved in the development program, Boeing said, compared to previous jetliners by having all the partners connected in real time to the same digital toolset. The event itself used engineering-based simulations and video of production getting under way to unveil plans for the 787’s final assembly production flow.
“This is not a cartoon made up for display, but real digital data,” said Bair, who stood in front of giant projected screens as what appeared to be an almost full-scale image of a 787 “rolled” into a virtual Everett building. Bair revealed that the assembly line would require about five hundred workers initially, rising to as many as eight hundred when production peaked at about one aircraft every three days. Compared to the many thousands required for earlier Boeing “7-series” jetliners, this was an astonishingly low number of workers for such rates. The projected final-assembly cycle time was just six days by the one-hundredth aircraft.
Painful though the adjustment seemed to local unions, the production plan reflected Boeing’s new role as a large-scale integrator rather than as the traditional original-equipment manufacturer. Also, though no one could know at that time, the troubles to come would trigger union strife and require far more resources to solve than Boeing or anyone else had ever predicted.
Even the assembly-line crew would be different, and Boeing faced the challenge of developing a workforce combining experienced employees from other lines with a new group of specially trained employees. Under Boeing’s “Lean Plus” initiative, the employees, called manufacturing technicians, were cross-trained and certified in a variety of disciplines instead of just one. The technicians were trained to verify their own work and follow a “clean-as-you-go” policy to reduce the dangers of foreign-object damage.
“We partnered with Edmunds Community College to provide preemployment training [PET] at our new employment resource center [ERC] in Everett, which was set up in the fall of 2006,” said 787 Manufacturing and Quality Vice President Steve Westby. To get a place on the 787 line, applicants underwent assessments before completing eighty-seven hours of PET training in their own time. Training for the first class started in January 2007, with trainees completing ten weeks of course work covering forty-four different job functions. The training involved working on actual 787 fuselage sections for added realism. “We expect over eleven hundred people will have gone through the ERC by the end of 2007,” said Westby, who added that the mixed intake helped avoid added stress on the skilled workforce. “When we started work on the 787 the other programs were already running at a fairly high rate of production and we didn’t want to interrupt those.”
The first Section 11/45 was completed on schedule in Japan in December 2006 and arrived by 747LCF Dreamlifter at Global Aeronautica’s fuselage integration site in Charleston, South Carolina, on January 15, 2007, along with the first Section 43 forward fuselage from Kawasaki. The Alenia-made horizontal stabilizer became the first major assembly to be delivered to the Everett site, arriving on April 24 on board Dreamlifter N708BA, which provided a treat to plane spotters in Prestwick, Scotland, where it stopped to refuel en route from Grottaglie, Italy.
The first complete vertical fin made a much shorter journey, from Boeing’s Frederickson site up to Everett on May 7. Meanwhile, Mitsubishi’s first shipset of one-hundred-foot-long composite wings, completing the Japanese 35 percent share of structural work, was delivered directly to Everett