Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [93]
These challenges were increasingly focused on trying to strengthen the weakest links in the supply chain. Less than two weeks after moving out of the 787 program, Bair hinted that Boeing’s patience with some of its team members was just about exhausted. Speaking frankly to the Snohomish County Economic Development Council about unidentified suppliers, he said, “Some of these guys we won’t use again. We made a bunch of mistakes and we learned a lot.” He also proposed that future projects could be developed around “supersites” where suppliers and final assembly could be colocated to minimize logistics and improve responsiveness.
But who were these delinquent suppliers? A big clue came in early November, when Shanahan announced that Scott Strode, previously vice president of airplane definition and production, was to be sent to “oversee” all 787 activities with Vought Aircraft Industries. Within the week, Vought CEO Elmer Doty openly acknowledged to analysts, “I don’t think you need rumors to assume we are among the riskiest, if not the riskiest, of the structure producers.”
Dispatching Strode to Vought was the closest Boeing had come to openly exposing the need for much tighter control over its suppliers. In early December, just days before the first 787 update under Shanahan’s watch, Carson commented, “In addition to oversight, you need insight into what’s actually going on in those factories. Had we had adequate insight, we could have helped our suppliers understand the challenges.”
Boeing now targeted January 2008 for the power-on milestone, the moment when the 787 systems would be powered up and the aircraft begin to come to life. Shanahan explained why this was important. “First, power-on is a significant knowledge point technically because we can then retire risk around the integration of the airplane. And second, our schedule becomes much more predictable once we get the power on because the airplane is finally in the state that our factory was designed for.”
Boeing internally penciled in March 31, 2008, for first flight and believed that with an aggressive flight test program, it still might be able to deliver the first aircraft by the end of the year.
Most of Boeing traditionally closed down between Christmas and New Year, but for the besieged 787 team there was no such luxury. Despite round-the-clock shifts in 40-26 and a massive ramp-up of Boeing staff throughout the supply chain, further delays became inevitable. On January 16 Boeing announced fresh holdups and, worse still, said it would be at least two months before it could even identify how long the delivery delays would be or when the bulk of the test fleet would join the program.
Conformity control and quality assurance issues plagued the assembly buildup, compounding the issues created by the shortage of production-quality fasteners for the special requirements of the 787. Here missing fasteners and a handwritten note on an unfinished fuselage section typify the mounting problems. Mark Wagner
The first flight now slipped to about the end of June, with the blame again placed on traveled work and problems associated with verifying production records and processes. Shanahan said, “We thought in December over the holiday break we’d turn the corner on the completion of critical structural traveled work from our partners on the fuselage. We’ve not been able to finish that assembly work, and the process to reconcile the partner’s engineering with our production records and processes is very onerous and time-consuming. That’s proved to be the critical pacing item to putting power on the aircraft.” The new power-on target was early April.
Scott Carson added, “We have resisted the temptation this time to make a broad and sweeping generalization about where we are on the rest of the aircraft. Until we have completed an assessment of the condition of assembly on aircraft 2 through 6—that are critical to flight test—we don’t want to be in a position where we have to do all this again.” Carson did acknowledge,