Boeing's new birthing suite

Boeing opened up the 787 Dreamliner assembly bay in Everett to journalists Monday, showing the first airplane just beginning to come together, using new processes, new skills — and new people.

Scott Strode, vice president in charge of production, admitted to some teething issues, but said 787 production remains on schedule for a July 8 rollout of the first aircraft.

And soon, he said, the majority of the workers joining the pieces will be fresh, young faces with newly learned skills.

For the moment, hundreds of experienced Boeing mechanics are helping install systems on the first airplane that parts suppliers didn't finish in time.

They are dealing with last-minute issues, from installing wiring that wasn't done to shortages of fasteners.

Don Bryant, who helps manage the assembly facility, said the spectrum of what he's had to deal with runs from great to ugly. His job, he said, has sometimes required "intestinal fortitude."

"This stuff isn't easy," Bryant said. "It's a real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

Yet Strode said the problems have been "fairly classic stuff" for a new airplane program, "nothing particularly extraordinary."

Phone interviews with Everett machinists last week, each speaking without company permission and requesting anonymity, largely backed up that judgment.

"Everything looks good," said one. "Some of the problems are exactly what they expected. They are prepared for it."

Some workmanship issues that showed up on the big parts from partners overseas were found only with a fine-tooth comb and a magnifying glass, another said.

"You have to do that for the first couple of airplanes," he added. "It's nothing that can't be fixed."

Strode said that managing the supply of "little detail parts — clips, little miscellaneous pieces of structure, and fasteners — has been a bigger challenge than we anticipated."

But he said Boeing expects to get through the teething problems with its supply chain after just a few airplanes.

A pre-installed future

After "a very few units," he said, parts will be arriving from Italy, Japan and across the U.S. in a more finished state, with most of the systems pre-installed.

Strode said that by Dreamliner No. 100, Boeing will achieve a work flow of one 787 every six days, with an eventual goal of reducing assembly time to three days.

Access for journalists was severely limited at the "grand opening" Monday. The media were confined to a third-floor balcony about 200 yards from the assembly position on the floor below.

Yet that view revealed the new assembly model borrows some elements from the Airbus A380 superjumbo assembly plant in Toulouse, France, adding some of Boeing's lean-production methods.

As at Airbus, massive airplane pieces are delivered from other locations on a giant air transport — Boeing's is called the Dreamlifter — and are joined in a single position inside the factory.

After that first assembly station, the airplane moves forward into three more stations, as the systems and interiors are installed and tested.

"The Big Bang"

The structural-assembly position is referred to as "the Big Bang," said Brennan Dunlap, the engineer in charge of the assembly equipment.

The jet's huge sections are aligned precisely, using lasers in the ceiling rafters.

Airbus assembles its plane parts in a giant immovable structure. But Boeing's Big Bang holding fixtures are flexible and slide into position on tracks in the floor.

Boeing engineers couldn't resist naming the biggest of their fixtures the Mother of All Tooling Towers, or MOATT, even though it's not as monumental a fixed structure as some of the tooling equipment on other jet programs and nowhere near as big as the A380 assembly jig in Toulouse.

The MOATT is stabilized with anchors sunk 24 feet deep beneath the floor.

It closes like a clam shell to swing the horizontal tail into position.

Also in the Big Bang position, two circular "circumferential join tools" encase the two major fuselage joins and hold the parts as an automatic drilling machine works along them.

"There are very, very few manually drilled holes," said Steve Westby vice president in charge of 787 manufacturing and quality.

That means the work on the assembly line requires different skills than Boeing has traditionally needed.

Strode said that once the current mechanics borrowed from the 777 and other programs return to their own work, most of the 787 assembly work force will be new hires straight from school — trained in assembling an airplane made from lightweight carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic rather than aluminum.

"We don't want to overdisrupt production [of current jets] by taking the skilled work force out," Strode said

"Manufacturing technicians"

Each of the 787 "manufacturing technicians" totes a wireless tablet computer with jet-assembly instructions accessible at the touch of a screen.

Before applying to Boeing, the new hires had all completed an 87-hour training program run in Everett by Edmonds Community College. The program is funded by the state and will be used exclusively by Boeing for the first five years.

More than 1,000 trainees will have completed the Edmonds training course by the end of the year, Westby said.

Once hired, the new technicians do 10 weeks of on-the-job training.

As one veteran Boeing mechanic put it, on an airplane made from lightweight carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic, even drilling a hole is different than on an aluminum structure.

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