A Midsummer Dreamliner Update - Part Two

At Global Aeronautica in Charleston, SC the challenges of the past year continue to persist, but Boeing is further increasing its presence at the facility, according to sources, leveraging its 50 percent stake in the joint venture to achieve a normal production flow.

Boeing continues to increase the number of manufacturing and quality engineers at the North Charleston factory, though even with the expertise held by the newly arrived staff, the learning curve exists for both Boeing and native Charleston staff as well.

"When you're building the first few units, manufacturing planning is the first place that captures a tremendous amount of learning," says Shanahan. "That's where you reconcile all the engineering and the parts and the tooling and the detailed steps of the process and believe it or not, the final end state of those manufacturing plans is a lot more mature after two or three units than on number one.

"The first one is always the hardest because there are so many changes, but in terms of coming down the [learning] curve you say what has the most impact of stabilizing the engineering, getting the manufacturing planning done well, doing the proper scheduling, working out the bugs in the tooling and then you get the mechanic."

Shanahan adds that for the mechanic working directly with the aircraft, the long cycle length, 20 to 30 days, the time between starting and finishing work on a shipset, experience is the key driver in overcoming the learning curve.

Shanahan believes that the employees, "at Global Aeronautica have a much better chance of doing their job if all they have to do is contend with is doing their work, that allows them to do things more in sequence."

With shop complete structures coming to Charleston, the question becomes how quickly Global Aeronautica is able to integrate the systems and deliver them to final assembly. Dreamliner Four had the longest integration time of any center fuselage at almost eleven months; though it was the most complete to date. To meet the demands of the production ramp up, Global Aeronautica must reduce shipset integration time to keep pace with other structural suppliers.

"At Global, it's been more process we've had to supplement, pick your problem," says Shanahan. "Traveled work, part shortages, management that doesn't have the depth of experience in aerospace and obviously new workers...it's an interesting mix of skills to be outside of Everett, Washington."

Staff hired directly by Global Aeronautica are responsible solely for the structural join of the center fuselage. Following the join, contractors from Boeing, Alenia and the Kawasaki and Fuji Heavy Industries take over to integrate the barrels with systems, wiring, ducting and insulation.

By mid-month Global Aeronautica is expected to receive structural sections for Dreamliner Eight, the second production 787, and the 10th to come through Charleson. To date, Global Aeronautica has accommodated up to four shipsets at a time. The Charleston facility has a maximum capacity of up to 10 shipsets, five on each existing line.

The division of responsibilities amongst the global staff has led to cultural tensions amongst the Italian, Japanese and American staff, according to one veteran engineer at the Charleston facility. The language barrier has been a significant challenge to overcome, be it with travel tags written in Japanese or Italian or even the day-to-day interactions.

Another veteran engineer, who has since left Charleston, says that even with the communications barrier, the universal language was the engineering plan, cultural adaptation came in time.

The obstacles in Charleston have also presented opportunities for Boeing. The Dreamliner Four center fuselage production incident was used to reduce the traveled work coming to Washington. The repair, which was completed within days of the initial incident, caused Boeing to reassess its delivery of the section.

The center fuselage was initially due in by the end of June, but was delivered five weeks later than initially planned. Rather than deliver as soon as the repair was complete, Boeing opted to hold the section in Charleston to continue work to increase the completion of assembly.

"We will not be efficient in our ramp up if we continue to let the partners travel work," said Shanahan. "This whole production system is based on the model that says we will not travel work.

"When I put work into final assembly, and we've demonstrated this over and over, we are not good and efficient at doing [traveled] work. The supplier, the partner can do it 10 times better than we can.  At some point you have to just say, we have to ring this out of the production system."

All photographs are copyright FlightBlogger and taken in June 2008.

1. Dreamliners 4-7 at Spirit Aerosystems in Wichita.
2. Dreamliner 5 center fuselage in Charleston.
3. Global Aeronautica body join tooling.
4. Dreamliner 7 aft fuselage at Vought.
5. Aft fuselage for Dreamliners 12, 13 and 14