Chief of 787 Dreamliner's supply chain takes stress in stride

WICHITA, KAN. — What's it been like to be the guy in charge of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner supply chain over the past year, when disastrous supplier snafus led to the longest program delay in company history?

"Stressful," said Bob Noble, vice president of 787 supplier management. "Very, very stressful."

On a recent doctor's visit, said Noble, the nurse checked his blood pressure and exclaimed, "Oh my God, it's really high."

Noble, who had his BlackBerry in hand, told her he knew why. "I just read an e-mail that pissed me off. Give me five minutes to answer this e-mail."

Checked again five minutes later, his blood pressure was normal.

"It's OK," he told the nurse. "That's just my life."

Noble, 50, is soft-spoken and down to earth. He has spent 24 years in aerospace manufacturing, two decades of that at Boeing, and almost all that time his job has been to make sure suppliers deliver the right thing at the right time.

"This is the only life I've known," he said.

Boeing has acknowledged that it misjudged and mismanaged the supply chain at the start of the Dreamliner program.

But Noble said, "Every airplane I've ever worked on has had a parts problem when it started up."

Noble maintains a calm demeanor despite a frenzied schedule. This week he oversaw a media tour of 787 supplier facilities — two on Tuesday in Charleston, S.C., one in Wichita on Thursday. In between, he managed a Wednesday visit to systems supplier Hamilton Sundstrand in Rockford, Ill.

But those were short trips. His job constantly takes him all over the globe, from Japan to Italy to Russia.

Immersed in his suppliers' work, even on the media tour Noble fussed over small details.

At the Spirit AeroSystems plant in Wichita, Noble looked worriedly at the nose-and-cockpit section of the fourth Dreamliner resting in a systems-installation station. One part of the surrounding framework of fixtures seemed awfully close to his precious carbon-fiber fuselage.

"Is it supposed to be that close?" he quietly asked Harold Leslie, Spirit's man in charge of systems installation.

No worries. Yes, it was.

Noble said that once the initial batch of airplanes is completed, after a delay that has stretched to 14 months for the first delivery, Boeing and its partners will have to carefully manage an increase in production rates.

The increased flow of parts must be secure. The availability of tools and shipping fixtures and rail cars must be geared up.

"Minding the parts is a big deal," Noble said. "You've got to be sure everyone down through the parts stream is ready to move up."

"Sometimes, you worry all the way back to dirt," he added.

He recalled visiting the facility in Verkhnaya Salda, Russia, owned by VSMPO-AVISMA, that supplies Boeing with titanium. It wasn't enough to look at the product — he checked with experts there on the world supply of the black sand called rutile that is a major source of titanium ore.

And yet, despite all the stress of minding those far-flung details, Noble said that a change in corporate culture has made his world a little kinder.

Aerospace manufacturing has historically been a macho world. Noble recalled that on his first day in a job at Lockheed Martin back in the late 1970s, he was vehemently cursed out by an executive he'd never met.

"The way we treated each other back in the '80s wasn't as nice as the way we treat each other today," he said. "There's been an evolution of culture: the language that's used, the way we treat people, the respect we show people is different."

And as for the supplier travails of the past year, which mean some airlines will get their Dreamliners as much as 28 months late, Noble claims a steadfast confidence through it all.

"I've never lost faith in the airplane and the production system," he said.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com