From FOX News:
Boeing to move all 787 Dreamliner production to South Carolina
Boeing Co. will set plans this week to consolidate 787 Dreamliner assembly in South Carolina, people familiar with the matter said, ending production of that jetliner in Washington state as the coronavirus pandemic saps demand for aircraft.
Earlier this year, Boeing said it would slash production of passenger jets and cut its workforce by about 10%. As the pandemic worsened in the U.S. and air-travel demand remained deeply depressed, Boeing said it was weighing cuts beyond the 19,000 already earmarked.
Boeing has assembled the 787 Dreamliner in Everett, Wash., since the first of the popular widebodies rolled off the line there over a decade ago. It announced plans in 2009 for a second line in North Charleston, S.C., a right-to-work state where attempts to unionize the workforce haven’t succeeded.
Also, which region of the country has seen four months of continuous riots, an attempted secessionist enclave, and is run by a Mayor, City Council, and Governor that supports Antifa?
The Everett plant, where Boeing also produces 767s and 747s, produced around 15 widebody jets a month at its peak, which would drop to around six and fall further with the 747 program due to end in 2022 and output of the new 777X reduced as Boeing delayed first deliveries until 2022.
I would put money on Boeing eventually pulling entirely out of the Seattle area by 2025, with production in South Carolina and possibly expanding production in Alabama.
Other businesses are fleeing the Seattle area. It seems like Boeing is going to take advantage of some of its other problems to do the same. The effect on the Seattle economy will be devastating.
Resurrected slogan from the sixties: “Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights.”
And yet, Boeing’s management will still remain a thousand miles away from the production floor.
True, but what about the engineers who thought it was a reasonable thing to design a device whose purpose it is to point the airplane towards the ground, and build that without fault tolerance? Clearly more senior engineers and engineering managers should have caught that and stopped it, but no qualified engineer would have designed such a thing in the first place.
I don’t think every one involved in that failure is located away from Seattle.
They built it the way they did because all a pilot had to do if it malfunctioned was reach out and switch the MCAS off and take manual control. Very simple. A couple of badly trained pilots never got the memo for some reason, and now Boeing has to loose billions of dollars to reengineer the thing to make it COMPLETELY idiot proof, since it’s been proven beyond a doubt that just training the pilots to perform a simple procedure is far to much to expect. Makes one suspicious about these overseas pilots in general.
Yes, but you forgot that Boeing left out MCAS from its training, trying to treat it as transparent to the user. They had to, in order to avoid a larger retraining hit when switching from other 737 models to the MAX.
And besides, “you could have switched it off” is no excuse for designing a dangerous device. It’s a bit like saying a gun that fires when dropped is perfectly ok, because if you keep the safety on it won’t do that. Sorry, that doesn’t meet my standards of competent engineering.
Yes, but who hired those incompetents in the first place, and then let those design decisions move forward?
Having been an engineer in a failed company, this is managements fault. If they put profit over safety and punish people who speak up in ways that will hold up production schedules, you get disasters like this.
It’s east to say “engineers should have blown the whistle.” But it’s hard to do that when the consequences are you lose your career and go broke.
Dad worked for Boeing in Seattle in the early 50s working on designing “stuff” for the the B-52. At that time engineers and managers worked in the same complex as the guys doing the assembly. If there was a problem on the line, the engineer went to the line to resolve it ASAP and get the fix implemented and retrofitted as needed. The process worked so well that B-52 airframes made in the 60s are still flying with upgraded electronics and engines. We, as a country, lost a lot when we decided that MBAs with no technical experience should manage technical projects.