Boeing delays 737 deliveries due to parts problem

Boeing Co., which is ramping up commercial airplane production after a costly strike, said Thursday it was delaying the delivery of 737 jetliners and planning to inspect some already in service to replace parts that lacked a required anticorrosion coating.

The uncoated nutplates, small fastening devices used to attach bundles of wires and other items to the inside of 737 fuselages, had been used since August 2007, said Vicki Ray, a company spokeswoman. Boeing delivered 394 of the planes between then and October of this year, according to Chicago-based Boeing's Web site.

The problematic parts lack a cadmium coating that would help prevent corrosion on adjoining aluminum parts and do not pose an immediate flight safety risk, she said. Thousands of nutplates are used on each 737.

Boeing, the world's second-largest commercial airplane maker after Europe's Airbus, has been inspecting 737s at its commercial aircraft plants near Seattle, though production of the planes has not resumed since an eight-week strike by assembly workers ended earlier this month.

"We're replacing them as we find them," said Ray, the Boeing spokeswoman. "Also to be addressed is the in-service fleet, and we're still working on a plan for that."

Boeing was notified about the problem by a Wichita, Kan., company that builds wing and fuselage components for nearly every Boeing commercial aircraft, Spirit AeroSystems Inc.

Spirit, which operates a facility formerly owned by Boeing, got the bad nutplates from one of about three suppliers of the parts and discovered the problem in August, said Ken Evans, a Spirit spokesman.

"Our re-work is going very well," he said. "We feel pretty good about it."

Boeing's 737 is the world's best-selling commercial jet with more than 6,000 orders since the model was launched in 1965 and 5,397 in use worldwide.

Shares of Boeing slipped 64 cents or 1.5 percent, to $43.16 on Thursday.

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